Child Of Madness
by Neon Hades
Summary: Set in the Fleetway Sonicverse, a hitherto unknown creation of Robotnik's is found in the caverns under the Emerald Hill Zone. But what are this sinister android foe's real motives? And who are the Machinists that follow in his wake...
1. Machinist Dreams

**Machinist Dreams**

If the machine's eyes had been open, it would still have been dark.

The bleak gloom of the catacomb in which it rested may as well have been lifted from the surface of the moon. Its floor and walls were pitted with craters and crevices, the rock cracked and cut by the tiny rivulets of moisture that ran from the ceiling. From occasional breaks in the lofty, arching roof of the cavern, where from the floor one could even faintly distinguish the soft texture of natural soil and the wispy threads of still-growing grass, feeble beams of light lanced through the eternal dusk, serving not so much to cast light as to highlight the existing blackness. Amid the ever-present murmur of running water, a few bats chittered from somewhere in the winding passages. For all its apparent menace, it could still have been a perfectly natural cave, yet another shining example of the tourist-pulling subterranean tunnels that honeycombed the Emerald Hill Zone. Had the authorities known of this place, it is highly possible that it would have been swarming with visitors and aglow with camera flash bulbs in the blink of an eye.

This, however, was not a cave that attracted that kind of attention. Along the walls, thickened like armour under years of accumulated grime, the faint outline of a logo, a stark moustachioed face leering out of a metal plate, told its own story. That sneering face contained within it all the malice, contempt and greed that had tormented and suffocated an entire planet for years. It told of a struggle that had nearly obliterated all that remained good on Mobius, and one that its people would never return to lest some force from the stars dragged them screaming back into the Dark Ages. This cave deserved to be left alone, and to have the elements rot it. It was fitting punishment for the way it had contributed to the rotting of the world.

The room in question still played host to that unspeakable legacy. Broken computer terminals, trailing wires, fossilised blueprints and CDs and rusted instruments, all caked with a layer of limestone and loam that was thickening inexorably every day. It was as if the land itself had moulded itself into a tombstone, serving at last to lay this place to waste and bury forever all that it represented.

But in one corner, under the hood of a bank of lights that had long since burned out and broke, one final piece in this mural of terror stood defiant against the decay that was claiming the cavern around it. Iron bolts, rusted to the point of uselessness, bound it to a stout operations bench where it reclined in a stiff, moribund posture that suggested it should be in a coffin. Through the haze of dust, it was just possible to see a faint metallic gleam against the dead sunlight, as photon fingers curled around a heavily built, golden frame. Its hands were, even in its sleep, balled into wrecking-ball fists by its side, batteries of unused weaponry bristling around its wrists and lining its hips. Legs like oak trees rooted it to the stone floor, supporting it to perpetual attention. Only the head, slumped in disuse across its barrel chest from a stout, wire-ridden neck, betrayed any signs that the machine, for that was what it was, was not active. Two gigantic lamps that would have served as its eyes stared determinedly at its feet, their glow dulled for the moment, its bank of square teeth set into a stone-faced growl.

Why the designer had deigned to give it teeth was a mystery. But it did create a very imposing grin.

Slumped in suspended animation against its dying surroundings, standing alone against the clutter that was heaped all around it, the creature remained, as it had done for years. How many never mattered. They would not matter when the day came at last.

Even as it stood utterly motionless, a great energy seemed to bubble just under its stainless skin. A power yet to be tapped, a fury that could lay a world to waste.

The power to conquer the world stood briskly in rest against the wall, soaked in darkness, wrapped in rock, smothered by ignorance.

If it had been able to anticipate at the time, it would have. It would also have laughed.

There were a number of things that Sonic truly hated. Among them: megalomaniacal ex-dictators, wannabee rivals….

….and not being able to run.

His friends continually told him that he needed to rein in his hyperactive tendencies, but he had shrugged aside these particular remarks in a usual whirlwind of blue spikes as he streaked over the horizon. But there was only so much running one cooler-than-cool blue hedgehog could do before you started to feel like you were seeing the same things twice. So, after a number of lightning quick round-the-world trips, Sonic had finally, uncharacteristically, confined himself to the Freedom Fighter base of operations in the Emerald Hill Zone to see if he could find some other way of entertaining himself. He was already regretting it.

The base itself was looking almost as bored as he felt these days. Tails had set up an impromptu hammock, strung haphazardly across the north-east corner of the room, where he was presently trying to sleep through the doldrums and awake when something interesting happened. One of his distinctive double-tails was draped like a blanket across his face, apparently acting as a sleep-aid, while the other swung idly in the breeze of an open window. With Tails dozing, Sonic allowed himself a wry grin. At least Tails had some capacity to switch-off when there was no action to be had. This was more than could be said for Amy, who was idly flicking a tennis ball against a wall in a vain attempt to improve her already exemplary hand-eye coordination. The repeated 'ker-thunk' of the ball hitting the metal wound around Sonic like a steel cord, suffocating him even further. The only other signs of activity in the entire place came from the Kintobor computer, who was rapidly exchanging excited-sounding radio banter with the Floating Island. Sonic recognised the voice of Porker Lewis from the other end of the line.

"Old hideaways, you say? From the RRB period?"

"Almost certainly," Porker chirped from the speaker, his voice becoming as unusually high-pitched as it always did when he became giddy, "I've been monitoring some satellite data for some time now. It seems that Robotnik had several major orbital weapons platforms in construction over the planet not long before his committal. I've been analysing their core memory banks, it's like stumbling into a gold mine!"

"Fascinating…." Kintobor mused, "and you think that you might be able to break the codewalls regarding their location?"

"As soon as I get these new algorithms cracked, the safety precautions are extremely complicated…"

Sonic took great care at this point to zone out whatever was being said by the two scientists. Unless it could be run through, knocked senseless or blown to pieces, he really wasn't interested.

"I don't personally see the attraction," Sonic drawled, "So walrus-chops left some of his toys behind. Why should we touch 'em?"

"Now really Sonic, that isn't like you," Kintobor clucked, "Some of this machinery could bring serious benefits to the people of Mobius if we can lay hold of them. I have to say, Robotnik was _extremely _ahead of his time…"

Sonic shot Kintobor a venomous stare. Compliments about Robotnik didn't get past him.

"Yeah, a leading expert in the field of ripping planets from the roots, burning homes to the ground, turning innocent people into badniks on a production line basis…. Did I also mention that he's tried to kill us all more than once!" He hissed, with a dreadful note of finality. Kintobor appeared to concede, hanging his disembodied head.

"Well yes, of course, such an evil has never tread the planet…. But if some of this technology could be reversed engineered, re-programmed to help the public…."

"Who knows?" Sonic spat, "By tomorrow we could have a death-ray in every house! One pet badnik for every child! Now _that's _what I call progress!"

From the other end of the line, Porker's voice crackled through.

"Sonic, this is narrow-minded, even for you. Nobody has a greater contempt for what Robotnik did to Mobius than we do, I fought alongside you against him for more years than I'd care to count…. But if we have any opportunity to undo some of the damage that he's done to our world then we owe it to everyone to take it. Even you couldn't deny that!"

Sonic narrowed his eyes and dropped his gaze from the terminal, but said nothing. Porker had proven his point. He certainly knew of the horrors that Robotnik had once been able to conjure. He had been a prisoner of the Brotherhood of Metallix for over a month, stuck on the Miracle Planet while the Emperor and his robotic hordes had altered the timeline of Mobius itself and nearly wiped all organic life from existence. It was this incident that had pushed Porker into a nervous breakdown and, eventually, to leave the Freedom Fighters. Porker had certainly earned the right to contradict Sonic. If anyone knew of the evils of the past, it was him.

"We actually managed to zone in on a couple of bases in close proximity to you, in the Emerald Hill Zone!" Porker continued, "Most of South Island is riddled with subterranean tunnels, it would have been a perfect spot for Robotnik to launch some kind of a sneak attack. Luckily, we brought him down before the badnik production could start. Knuckles and I are going to take a look around ourselves, see if there's something we can salvage."

"I guess that means we can leave you to it," Sonic replied, barely stifling a yawn, "I need a run anyway, and those tunnels aren't the place for it."

At this point, Sonic began to flex the muscles in his arms and legs, feeling the power seep back into them after his long period of boredom. If nothing else, he may as well stretch his legs, but it had been getting less fun doing it alone. He craned his neck as he got to his feet, eyeing Tails from across the room.

"Yo, Tails!"

In his hammock, the fox stirred. He gave himself a brisk shake from crown to both quivering tails as Sonic's distinctive voice pulled him back from sleep.

"No time for dozing pixel-brain, I'm getting tired of this place! I feel a run-around coming on."

Tails stretched his limbs in response, several bones clicking into place. A new confidence had crept into his eyes, a streak of adolescence that was so unlike the persona of his guerrilla days.

"What'd ya have in mind?"

"Three laps of the Emerald Hill Zone, from here to the coast, back to the Frozen Zone border and back. You get a head start." He added, casting a sly grin at his friend and planting one foot in readiness against a convenient wall. Tails leered back, then sent a brief, powerful gust sweeping through the space with a sharp twirl of his double-tails.

"See you on the horizon!"

Tails was in the air a moment later, both tails now a blur in the air behind him, piercing gouts of cold air rocketing between ceiling and floor. Then, springing off the wall behind him, he had accelerated past a terrified-looking Kintobor and out of the open window behind him. Tails was still gathering speed as he dwindled into the cotton clouds gathering over the Zone. Sonic nodded to himself, half in admiration, but retained his cocky sneer.

"Can't fault him for enthusiasm," he mused, habitually easing one ankle off the floor, "But when it comes to pure speed…."

Sonic had curled into a low crouch, both hands low in front of him, eyes fixed on the tiny gap of the window. Amy looked up briefly from her time-wasting and gave him a mocking glance.

"Shouldn't you be gone? Tails won't slow down for you."

"Good. Makes the race more interesting…."

Sonic was gone in the following second. All that remained of him was a vanishing blue sheen, an azure streak barrelling through the air and into the world beyond. From where she sat Amy had just enough time to see him uncurl from his trademark 'spin attack' technique, slide gracefully down the walls of a conveniently close house (past the stunned-looking occupants, apparently honoured to have Sonic blaze up and down their home) and break smoothly into a full-tilt sprint as he hit the ground. A whirl of motion and a resounding sonic-boom later Sonic was levelling with his opponent, both of them now shrinking specks against the vast shine of the ocean beyond. Amy allowed herself a grin. Sonic's amazing running ability had never failed to astonish her when she had first known him, but years of seeing him charge around Mobius faster than sound (or hearing him brag about doing so) had numbed her to it. She turned back to Knitobor, who had by now severed his link with Porker.

"Poetic justice…" she muttered, twirling the tennis ball around her free hand. Kintobot gave her a stare of incomprehension.

"Pardon?"

"Poetic justice," Amy repeated, smiling, "you and this excavation thing. Years ago all the things in those hideouts would have been used to try and wipe us all out and tighten Robotnik's control over everyone that was left. Now we're going to use it to get this world back on its feet while he gets to watch from his padded cell! The very things he created are going to erase the last traces of his legacy. See?"

Kintobor gave an intellectual nod.

"Poetic justice," he echoed, "very profound, Amy."

She smirked and bounced the ball idly against the wall a few more times.

"I'm not just a pretty face you know."

"Well, I'm sure we can find someone to appreciate that as well," Kintobor chuckled, "besides Sonic I mean."

Amy giggled, and raised an eyebrow at the holographic pensioner in front of her.

"Amen."

At this point, she finally threw down the tennis ball with a bored huff.

"Bored," she finished, making for the door, "maybe I can take the crossbow on the range for a while…."


	2. Opening The Tomb

**Opening The Tomb**

A rockface. What would have been the entrance to a labyrinthine network of tunnels beneath the Emerald Hill Zone. Nature had at last got the upper hand over the rusted metal supports that would once have bordered a stout sliding door mechanism, leaving a tumbled wall of rock and debris, ton upon ton of it, sealing any way in or out of the place. At least, for those without the will, or sheer muscle, to force their way into the gloom that lay beyond.

From the other side of the wall, muffled by pillows of granite and basalt, came the stifled but unmistakeable roar of a certain wild echidna. Then, a heartbeat later, light was shining like a sword through a sudden breach in the rock, erupting into being in a fountain of dust and powder. A gloved fist, crowned with a fearsome duo of pointed spikes, withdrew itself from the hole it had made, allowing a narrowed, cautious purple iris to peer through.

"Should be easy enough to shift the rest of it…" came the gruff drawl from the world outside. It was followed by a higher, slightly more nervous response.

"You're the expert Knuckles. Fire away."

"I was waitin' for you to say that…."

With another guttural cry a boulder the size of a car was violently smashed aside. In a flurry of falling debris and brisk swipes from the crimson silhouette outside, the obstruction was unceremoniously cast aside, years worth of unmoveable rockfall evicted in a few furious seconds.

As the dust settled, with the darkness crawling out of the earth through this new entrance, Knuckles stood astride his handiwork with a self-admiring smile, massaging each fist in turn.

"She's all yours Porker. Now what happens?"

Porker himself, clad in his usual white-t-shirt and torn jeans, swept the beam of a torch briefly into the yawning vault ahead of him, and swallowed. He had convinced himself that his adventuring days had been left behind along with his Freedom Fighters membership, and plunging headfirst into what could potentially be a nest of dormant badniks or other instruments of death hadn't been his idea of an excavation, but his intellect screamed at him not to be such a fool. Spelunking couldn't be this dangerous, even if the cave in question was once a madman's property. He cast a glance at Knuckles, trying but largely failing to put on a confident, haughty look to match Sonic.

"Ready when you are, Red."

Knuckles groaned. He could bear Porker enough when he was nervous and neurotic, even when he was spouting techno-babble to make Kintobor blush, but trying to imitate glory-hogs like Sonic just didn't gel. With a brisk shake of the head, he stepped inside, moving ahead of his friend.

"Come on then, let's wrap this up fast. I don't want to stay in this dirt-hole a second longer than I have to."

Aside from the crunch of gravel and anonymous unfortunate insects under their feet, the cave held its breath. No visitor had tread these ghostly halls since a certain well-known, much hated dictator had lorded it over this sinister secret kingdom. Propaganda posters and loyalty slogans, filling the gaps between countless bolts and egg-shaped logos, shot feelings of deep rage into the pit of Knuckles' bowels. Had the perpetrator of the innumerable crimes associated with this place appeared before him, Knuckles would be ready to vent his murderous frustrations. Especially after all that had happened with the Death Egg, the Metallix Brotherhood, Brutus, the Chaos Monster… all his doing. It would be messy, Knuckles thought hotly as 'ALL HAIL ROBOTNIK' leered out at him in peeling red paint. There would be blood and teeth _everywhere_, not a single bone unbroken….

Violent, yes, but that was him. Forever to-the-point. And if the Doctor himself could not be present, Knuckles could at least show his appreciation by wrecking one of his bases.

By now, Porker had taken the lead, giving his full attention to every scrap of metal and wire that came under the beam of his torch. Knuckles spared a brief snort of laughter.

"What exactly are you expecting to find down here anyway? A new doomsday device for your car or something?"

Porker shrugged the remark aside.

"You're as bad as Sonic. Why does nobody take me seriously when I say some of the things here could be genuinely useful?"

"Could have something to do with what every sensible Mobian associates with the word 'Robotnik'," Knuckles growled, "including those who didn't wind up in the badnik-processing plants."

"Has it never occurred to anybody that parts from those processing plants could be used in the medical profession? Artificial organs, you know? Replacement bones, restructuring cancerous tissue, maybe even help the disabled to walk again!"

"Yeah, well, good luck with that one. I personally don't see what's wrong with the conventional methods of living longer, they've served me well enough!"

"And those would be?"

"Lots of sleep, fresh air, exercise, plenty of roughage, and never turn your back on a psychotic robot or hideous mutant freak, unless you _really _want to see what your head would look like without the rest of you."

Knuckles finished this lecture with a short shrug.

"All valid advice for living a healthy life." He emphasised. Porker shrugged back in response.

"Can't argue with that."

At this stage, the catacomb around the pair began to widen and branch out. The ceiling overhead soared away into a high, almost invisible dome, fringed with stalactites, while the walls suddenly opened wide like the innards of a clam, folding their dark embrace over what lay within. The dark heart of Robotnik's Emerald Hill Operations, various mechanical terrors festering therein, awaited the heroes. Knuckles visibly snarled and clenched a single fist.

"Take what you like Porker. Just steer clear of anything that looks like it might blow your head off."

"Fat chance," Porker snorted as he sifted through the crumbling pile of metallic plates that had once been a Mk III Motobug, "most of this stuff is prehistoric. Even I wouldn't have much trouble with some of these customers. Hardly seems worth coming really…." He added sadly. Knuckles shook his head briskly.

"I had a hunch this would happen. Did you really think a cave full of past-it badniks and weapons of mass destruction that were most probably steam-powered would be of any use?"

"We can but hope Knuckles. Take a look around, you might be able to find something."

"Good idea, I guess," Knuckles snorted, "my night-vision is better than yours, even with that torch."

"How'd you figure that out?"

Knuckles leered at him out of the dark, showing a set of gleaming, pearl-like teeth sharpened to a fine point.

"Because I was in a perfect position to break your neck just now, and you haven't done a thing about it…."

Porker squealed and spun violently where he stood, eyes swollen with fright, to see Knuckles standing at ease behind him, one arm raised as if in preparation for a karate-chop. Knuckles chortled again and lowered his arm, seeing Porker seethe with silent fury next to him.

"Relax Porker, I'm only fooling with you. The only thing that's likely to do you any damage round here is a rockfall…."

"Just look for something!" Porker snapped, showing rare gall in front of his peers, "And let me check this equipment!"

"Sheesh, I thought I had temper issues…."

Knuckles sighed and retired to a moulding corner of the cave to rifle through the innards of a broken trooper, while Porker returned to his work. Porker had to admit, the rascible echidna was starting to prove himself right. For all Porker's optimism, he should still have guessed that this errand was more of an archaeological dig than anything else. All of Robotnik's terrifying machinery had been state-of-the-art in its day, but since then Mobius had made bold strides in its freedom. With restrictions of scientific research no longer present, quantum leaps had come what seemed like every other day in medicine, transport and computing. Mobius had no use for the playthings of an insane despot any longer, Porker thought, as he gazed sadly at the severed, eyeless skull of an Aquatic Ruins model Grounder. Its drill-tipped beak, blunted by months of neglect, and its skin coated in a cracked shell of rust, mocked him from where it lay. It sent deeper feelings of loss skittering into Porker's stomach now than when it had been fully functional, bristling with weapons and a relentless urge to rip his body to bloody fragments. At least back then it would have been worth something. Now it was just junk.

As Porker worked his way along the rotting carcasses of Robotnik's machinery, the beam of his torch glanced suddenly off a brief metallic tint, a shine unscathed by the rust that seemed to have claimed everything else. Intrigued, Porker moved closer, the beams of light creeping gradually up the gargantuan body of a hulking brute of a machine. Porker stood transfixed to the spot, in awe of this forgotten creature. Even by the standards of Robotnik's powerful SBS Troopers, it was a giant, well over eight feet tall, studded with wires and steel cord bulging like well-toned muscles beneath a golden-coloured framework. Hydraulic pumps and electric wires coiled and twined around each other visibly in the still-open panels of the machine's spine, and its feet and hands were finished with stout, black plates of solid iron, like gloves and boots, that gave this armoured being the appearance of a warrior. It had clearly been meant as an enemy for Sonic and the other Freedom Fighters, or Robotnik would not have bothered to equip the monster with racks of unused weaponry, including what Porker realized as 'Vulcan' grade heavy energy pulse-launchers lining the knuckles of the robot's clenched fists. But for all its menace, Porker was still darkly fascinated by the machine. It had stood by itself against the foetor that had brought down the rest of Robitnik's creations, seemingly possessed of a will to survive that its peers had long since forgotten. Perhaps here, entombed among the forgotten chamber of horrors under the Emerald Hill Zone, was the paradigm technological shift he had been hoping for. With Robotnik gone, after all, there was nothing to stop him tending to the machine himself, finding some other use for it. This was altogether too good an opportunity to waste.

Poised low against the mammoth body of the android, Porker held his torch delicately in one hand, like a dentist's drill, and began scanning the robot's flawless skin with surgical precision for anything that may betray some means of identifying the machine. He wanted to know as much as possible about this being before he disturbed it; even he, with his comparatively slight strength, could easily have wrenched off the rusted iron bolts that held the machine in place, but he didn't want to risk damaging his find. Perhaps there was an easier way to loosen it? He certainly didn't want to turn to Knuckles brute force for help. After his earlier outburst it would just be embarrassing. As Porker continued in his work, Knuckles himself was still half-heartedly digging through piles of shattered CDs, looking for one that might still be intact. For all the good it'll do, he thought to himself.

"Porker, this is a waste of time. Even by Floating Island standards, this stuff is just so _low-tech_! I suppose you might be able to find some replacement parts for that boiler under the sleeping quarters, but other than that…."

A low, gravely but undoubtedly angry hum. A steady pulse of green light. A hiss of power returning to freshly awakened limbs.

Porker froze, crouched against the robot's hip, where he had passed his hand absently over a seemingly innocent continuation of armour. From the way it was now gradually brightening with an emerald glow, and from the way he could now sense a fresh current pouring through the robot's chest….

Porker had no more time to think. Before he could even yell, fingers like bars of steel had closed around his throat. With a whirr of metallic muscle, Porker saw an arm as thick as a bridge girder, covered in golden plates, hoist him off his feet like a toy, kicking and struggling feebly as the world swam before his eyes. Panicking and gasping for breath as his lungs began to burn for oxygen, Porker felt his face forcefully incline itself to gaze into the horrifying visage of his attacker. The head of the robot, which had been slumped drowsily over its chest until now, was very much active, steam curling from between the stout square of its jaws and teeth. Two gigantic eyes, dull before now, blazed with a furious red light, wavering and pulsing menacingly in the gloom. Porker saw the machine draw close to him, press its cold stare right into his face, imprinting itself into his dying nightmares. Then, in a low, hoarse voice, it muttered,

"Pathetic."

Everything happened at once. Porker was suddenly released, air rushing back into his grateful lungs, but now he was flying backwards, thrown by a force that could shake mountains, sailing into oblivion against the opposite wall. Porker closed his eyes, held what was left of his breath, waited for the back-breaking shock…

It came. But when it did, it came from another body. Knuckles, throwing himself into Porker head-on from behind, tackled his friend to the ground and rolled gracefully to a trained stop. As the dizziness rattled from skull wall to skull wall, Porker knew that Knuckles had broken his fall, come between him and death against the cavern rock. Knuckles inclined a dust-streaked head to his partner and managed a grim cough. Porker nodded breathlessly.

"Thanks…"

"Anytime."

From the other end of the cavern, a groan of straining iron drew the echidna's gaze. From out of the darkness, caught in the sudden ghastly illumination of a pair of bloody lamps, iron bonds strained, and then burst against the strength of their prisoner, thrown aside like scraps in a tornado. One pair of thunderous footsteps later and the robot had stepped forth, crushing its lesser brethren under its enormous tread, clenching and unclenching each fist in turn as if limbering up for a mighty brawl. As the red glow in the creature's eyes subsided to an icy blue, more gouts of steam blasted from its hollow jaws, now jerkily forming into a mad grin. It was a grin that spoke of another time, when the sky of Mobius was black with smoke, and its land wet with desperate tears. It was the grin of Robotnik, reincarnated in this hideous servant. The creature lifted its head, craned its stout neck, and bellowed with enough force to shake some loose debris from the cavern roof.

"I… live!"

Knuckles narrowed both eyes to razor thin slits, stance sliding gracefully into readiness for combat.

"Not for long."

With a snarl of pure hatred, Knuckles curled both fists into rock-crushing weapons and launched himself at the robot. Even the dark didn't mask the fire in his eyes now, or wash the riotous roar from his throat. First he had brooded. Now he would fight.


	3. The Titan Wakes

**The Titan Wakes**

Not many people saw the world like this. It seemed as if Sonic were seeing all of it at once, a never-ending river of colour that streamed past him in time to the roar of the blood in his ears, the landscape warping and bending for miles behind him in the wind of his passage. When he ran like this, Sonic became a passenger in his own body. Unfazed by fatigue, drawing off the power-charges of adrenalin now blasting through every cell of his being, he felt like he could run forever. Eyes picked out in sharp detail only the obstacles that might impede his progress. He dodged nimbly around a cluster of trees, barely even breaking a sweat. The rest of existence was a mere blur, a stain against the mind of the fastest thing alive.

And the best part was, Tails could _never _match him like this.

"Come on Tails, you aren't going easy on me are you?"

Amid Sonic's frantic howls of derision, an orange streak buzzed through the curtains of cloud miles overhead, getting lower every second to draw off ever decreasing reserves of energy. Tails' teeth were set into an iron grid, the long hair of his distinctive fringe matted with sweat against his face. From out of a mind that was presently a red-hot particle of concentration, Tails picked out mixed feelings of puzzlement and fury. He was flying as fast as his body would allow him, he must have hit the hundreds of miles an hour somewhere during the first lap and maintained it ever since. But his body was now felt like it was breaking apart under the strain of keeping up with Sonic. Sonic seemed impervious to the pain or tiredness that mere mortals felt running at this speed and over these distances. As he drew lower over the green smear that was now a small forest, Sonic's ringing overture of insults pierced through the wall of ache.

"Would it help if I stopped and took a nap?"

Sonic's jeers were all it took for Tails to twist his agonised lips into a smile and put on a spurt of acceleration that send needles of hot lead running in his twin tails. Sonic might slow down for him, if it meant that he could stop and wallow in his superior speed, but Tails was growing tired of being treated like a child. He would earn this respect at last. With a laugh that just managed to stave off his cries of pain, he shot forward with a new determination, drawing ever closer to the twisting blue series of after-images snaking along the earth below.

As he saw his friend drop closer, Sonic took a second to go over his progress. He knew he was on the third lap. He had passed the Stone Tower barely 10 seconds ago, meaning that he was almost at the end. Below him the grass was becoming thicker and lusher, the trees around him gradually gaining height and number as they crowded in on civilisation. Which meant that after another half-minute or so he would cross the finishing line outside the Freedom Fighter base and win! But he would have to get tough. Tails was now putting on an uncommon burst of speed and was almost drawing level with his opponent far below. Almost, but not quite. Sonic had been reserving his final trick for just such an eventuality. With his legs now becoming a blur of motion underneath him, Sonic consciously urged his muscles into a massive kick of acceleration. Putting real effort into his strides, Sonic tore across the crowding forest like a missile, battered by g-forces and nearly ripped apart under his own momentum. He didn't regret it however. He was only now beginning to tire slightly, and the end was nearly in sight. With Tails still tossing furiously in his wake, Sonic bent his head and charged. Barely another 15 seconds, he reckoned, and he would win.

It was at this point that, with all his available energy focussed on the race, Sonic was taken off guard. The ground beneath his hammering feet quaked faintly. Then, in a sudden shriek of rending earth and rock, it tore violently open underneath him, as if some unknown fault line had been disturbed. The sudden jerk and wretch of the rock below him took Sonic totally by surprise. Tumbling into the air as he leapt to avoid the break, he ended up somersaulting nimbly overhead, twisting so that he landed feet-first, but crucially, halted. In the intervening blink of an eye, Tails had screamed overhead, stripping some nearby plants of their leaves. Feeling the slipstream of Tails' flight whip through his spikes, Sonic turned to check on his friend and called loudly after him.

"Hey, not fair! I didn't see that quake coming!"

Tails pivoted gracefully where he stood, his whole body shuddering with exhaustion, but still smiling wildly.

"Sure, it's only fair when _you're _the fastest thing alive!"

Sonic growled in the direction of his friend, clenching each fist in irritation. A hero's pride could only take so much.

"Hey, if I hadn't stopped…."

At that moment, the ground began to shred itself again, this time not far to Sonic's right. He stared at the freshly-created ridge of rock next to him.

"What the…"

With a creak and a groan the ground had split again, this time at Sonic's feet. He skipped easily out of the way, but it was enough to unnerve him, and to persuade Tails to drop from his precarious height and take a closer look. The drone of his tails stopped abruptly as his feet met soft turf.

"I didn't think we got tremors around here…"

"I think you're right," Sonic mused, becoming vaguely aware of a series of thunderous rumblings and smashes somewhere underneath them, "but supposing this wasn't a tremor?"

"Trouble?"

A piercing shaft of golden light accompanied by the shriek of more breaking rocks seemed to tell its own story. Something monstrously powerful was taking place not far below them, and Sonic's overactive imagination, already starved of the action and danger it required to function, was leaping swiftly to its own conclusions.

"Let's assume, just for a second, that Porker's little expedition isn't going as routinely as planned, shall we?"

Tails would have disagreed, were it not for the sudden almighty ripping noise as more rock sliced itself apart just between his ankles.

"If Porker has, for some reason, managed to get himself caught in the jaws of one of Egg-Belly's death traps, it sounds like an excuse for us to party! It's all going on downstairs…."

Years ago, such a statement would have had Tails shrinking. Now, numbed by years of near-death adventure, he simply cocked his head and grinned.

"I could vouch for that. Now just give me an entrance and we'll get this show on the road…."

The robot's fist could be said to feel like iron, but this would be a stupid simile. It _was _iron. Pound upon pound of it, reinforced, powered by pure bloodlust, hammering like an express train into Knuckles' stomach. The impact caught him even as he lunged and tossed him like a doll into the air. Knuckles barely managed to catch himself and recover his balance in time to land clumsily in a crouched stance, bleary eyed and winded, with a freshly-activated powerhouse bearing down on him in a blaze of coldly shining fury. Rolling in time to dodge a punch that shattered the rock floor, Knuckles righted himself and launched a wild right hook that caught the android on the side of the head. The impact shook the robot to its neck, but the blow appeared to have done minimal damage. Another furious kick to the jaw didn't appear to have much effect. The giant staggered back a few feet, but its mammoth arms were sawing through the air past Knuckles' face a second later as it sent off an effortless barrage of swinging punches. Knuckles bobbed and wove beneath each before glimpsing a momentary weak spot, an opening in the wall of metallic limbs. He darted forward and planted his fist, with a blow that could cleave stone, squarely into the robot's chest. Shockwaves of hurt shuddered up his arm, the bones of his hand leapt into flaming pain, he felt the grimace grip his face. Surely, this hit would have counted? Apparently not. Behind squinted eyes, Knuckles was suddenly battered by a furious piston-kick to the stomach that sent him sprawling on his back across the dirt of the cave floor. The android rose from an iron-stanced crouch, braced against the brunt of Knuckles' bone-shredding punches, unnerved, to its feet.

"Don't play games with me, intruder. Is this seriously all you can offer me?"

Knuckles hid a slight tremble in his confidence behind a toothy growl.

"I'm just warming up, rust-bucket."

There was no time to trade further insults. The next thing Knuckles felt was a blast of searing heat and pain cannoning into him, catching him under the jaw and burying him in the cave wall several metres away. Amid the fading glow and dispersing explosion of rock, the machine lowered one outstretched hand. Fresh smoke curled around the energy launchers clustered at its palm, shrouded in a fading glow.

"So am I."

It had taken barely seconds to track down the entrance into the catacombs themselves. Tails had easily been able to distinguish the faded line of the tunnels, the bulges in the earth as they rose closer to the surface, and with mere seconds of super-sonic scouting over the surrounding countryside Sonic had found the clues he needed. The freshly carved presence, beaten out of the rock, of a legendary pair of fists that had left their mark only minutes before. The signs of Knuckles' presence were as definite as the rock he had shattered. And within the depthless darkness that the heroes could see within, the sounds of hectic battle, the pounding of fists against fists, of bodies against merciless rock, were unmistakeable. Not only was there a fight in progress somewhere in there, but Sonic's gut told him that it wasn't going well for the side of good. In which case, it was time he re-tipped the balance in their favour. He turned briefly to Tails, who was casting an apprehensive stare into a bank of featureless gloom, occasionally broken by sharp pangs of light.

"Ready to rumble, little buddy?"

Tails smiled. As inappropriate as the nickname seemed considering his age, he never tired of Sonic referring to him as his 'little buddy'. It reminded him of the mentor that Sonic had been for years, and the comrade he would always be.

"After you."

It took monumental effort for Knuckles to drag his battered body out of the sizeable crater that the robot's energy blast had created. His chest was scarred by innumerable burns, his gloves already beginning to redden as blood leaked into the fabric. He ignored the fresh cut that was shedding crimson fluid over his muzzle and tensed himself again. The robot was as fresh as ever, but Knuckles hadn't kicked into high-gear. Not yet. With a bestial roar he charged at the machine, expecting another defensive strike. He slid nimbly beneath an elbow that would have broken most of his ribs and drove his fists in rapid succession into the robot's unguarded underside. The colossus rocked where it stood and sent a massive fist whirling down for another strike, but Knuckles' reflexes were back on form now. He swept back out of the way of the punch and drove another hit into the small of the robot's back, again leaning all of his weight into the blow. He felt the metal buckle beneath his hand, but to his despair the android was, as ever, unshaken. Knuckles narrowly avoided a back-hander that could have obliterated his skull and made one last ditch effort to find some chink in his opponent's armour. Dragging one thick arm almost to the floor, he propelled himself upwards in a kick designed to scythe into the base of the robot's neck. A strike like that would have crippled an organic opponent. But the robot appeared to shrug the aside the kick with little more than a mechanical leer and a hiss of escaping steam that could have been a laugh.

"Unimpressive…"

In his horror at his sudden powerlessness Knuckles was oblivious. The outside world dripped away like tar, leaving a yawning void in which there only existed him, broken, bloodied and scared beyond his wits, and his opponent, pristine, muscular and laughing into his freshly opened wounds. He could almost have screamed as a suffocating grip closed around his ankle, bones shrinking beneath its metal skin, and carried him through space for a few eternal seconds before smashing him into the stone floor, burying him face-first into a callous stone grave.

Almost, but the will had left him with his defeat. There was only the darkness now. And the laughter.

"Sonic, you aren't slowing down are you?"

For once in his life, Tails was keeping pace with Sonic without straining his body to oblivion. Sonic himself had slowed to a trot as he skipped among the rocks and debris, and his pace seemed more hesitant than usual.

"It's this light…" he muttered, "if I shift into Sonic-speed in here I'll probably crash."

Tails allowed himself a chuckle.

"Not just taking your time to get to the action?"

A resounding crash pierced through where the silence should have been, a noise that carried with it all the blood and crushed marrow of a desperate duel to the death. Sonic grinned out of the dusk, his emerald eyes shining with the spark of excitement that would stay there to adventure's end.

"If it's action you want Tails…"

Porker could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Knuckles hadn't just been beaten, he had been thrashed, effortlessly dispatched at the hands of this awesome combatant. The echidna is question was currently groaning in agony as the sinister android ruthlessly pressed a gigantic foot into the small of his back, slowly plunging Knuckles' deeper into a puddle of his own blood, a soup of ruin and rock, in which Knuckles himself was coughing and spluttering, the picture of helplessness. The sight of this fearsome hero reduced to a shadow of his old glory by one of Robotnik's forgotten terrors was enough to send cold dread tumbling into Porker's bowels. This couldn't be happening. But the incessant wail of the broken Echidna as he writhed under the robot's boot reminded him of this terrible reality.

"I have to say, I'm disappointed," chimed the machine, sending a spike of steam rushing to the floor and Knuckles' prone body, "my data banks are filled to bursting with warnings about you. The mighty Knuckles the Echidna, the warrior who obliterated the Death Egg all those years ago, champion of the Floating Island. Clearly, my creator overestimated you. But then again, I was equipped to fight, not to lounge behind a desk and grow fat. True leaders must lead from the front…."

"Great, a lecture…." Knuckles coughed miserably, "I can see you've inherited Robotnik's speech skills. Doesn't bode well for your criminal career."

The robot smiled, and applied another ounce of pressure. Knuckles felt his spine warp, ready to give way.

"Remember where you are speaking from, infidel. How poetic," he added, an emerald flicker entering the blaze of his eyes, "the first casualty of the new world order dies beneath the heel of the new master of all life. Now that _does _bode well…."

The robot had already mentioned the fact that his databases were filled to the brim with information on the Freedom Fighters. He was well aware of Sonic the Hedgehog and the legends that surrounded his speed. He was more than prepared to deal with a fighter that could move at Mach 1. The great problem, of course, is that spotting a faster-than-sound Super Spin Attack in the dark, even for the world's most perfectly designed killing machine, is decidedly difficult.

The robot felt the punishing, metal shredding impact of the attack against its shoulder first. Then it heard the distinctive sneer from the dark.

"Hands off my buddies rusty. Now let's see you face up to a real fight."

The distraction was just long enough. Knuckles crawled dejectedly from beneath his tormentor as the giant moved his attention to the blue hedgehog that was glaring indignantly out of the gloom at him with two shining green irises. Another smile gripped its hollow lips, the piercing light of its eyes filled with enough hate and malice to turn its shell to flesh.

"Excellent. Two funerals in one day. I _am_ doing well….."


	4. Cryax

**Cryax**

Sonic, as a rule, didn't like pre-fight banter. Which didn't mean to say that banter wasn't fine, as long as your opponent was buried under a hail of punches and spin-attacks first. Then it was more gratifying, and less dangerous.

The fight began almost immediately. With a high-powered spring Sonic had vaulted head-on at his opponent, but the opening move had been what the robot was waiting for. It threw an immediate straight-arm punch which Sonic barely avoided with a last-second roll, barrelling fist-first into his rival's shoulder. The impact shook the machine like a bullet and it lashed out again, nearly driving Sonic into the stone. A swift-under-arm flip later and Sonic had buried an onslaught of whirling kicks into the back of the robot's neck and lower skull, dodged a violent shoulder barge and kicked off like an acrobat, recovering gracefully to land on both feet, grinning madly at his seething foe. The robot quaked with rising temper; it needed to remember that Sonic was a lot better at dodging than Knuckles.

"I'm still not registering," it snorted, bulking up its shield of bravado, "were those meant to hurt?"

The leering set of teeth in the dark became suddenly more visible as Sonic's grin widened. He attacked again, curling into a Spin Attack and charging for the robot's chest. A swift-side-step from the android was followed by a deceptively quick swat from the massive left arm. This time it did connect, throwing Sonic upside-down against the wall with a satisfying crunch. The machine allowed a red glimmer to creep back into its eyes. Clearly for all his speed Sonic was still frail. If his punches hit home, the hedgehog would go down twice as fast as Knuckles. Sonic picked himself to his feet, still reeling from his ungracious dispatch, and readied both fists. If his ego was at stake now, then this fight was going to get serious.

While Sonic had begun his frantic bout with the robot, Tails had taken the time to see to Porker, whose nerves were nearing collapse amid the sudden explosion of fists and feet, and Knuckles, who was still lacking the energy to walk and was instead fumbling to stem the blood that was pouring from the slashes in his chest and upper-body. The echidna prised one livid purple eye open as Tails stole into being next to him.

"Knuckles! Are you…"

"M'okay…" Knuckles grunted, hauling himself awkwardly onto his knees with all the effort that his torn arms could muster. Tails stared in stark fascination as a thin line of blood wound along his face and trickled to the floor.

"Wow… looks like that robot put up one hell of a fight…"

"You talk as if it's over…" Knuckles snarled, turning one eye towards the random collection of blue and gold blurs that was now Sonic's battle. He clenched one fist, cringing with the pain, and tried to inch forward.

"That thing is in for some serious head-splitting as soon as I…."

"Hold it!"

Tails moved in time to stop Knuckles from flinging himself back into the fray, catching him on the chest. The fact that he was then able to restrain the battered echidna was a clear indication of how thorough a beating the robot had given him. He rested Knuckles against the crags of the cave wall and surveyed the damage. Strange to think that in all his years with Freedom Fighters he had never seen gore like this. A trace of his old youthful anxiety flashed across the sky-blue of his eyes.

"You're going nowhere near that thing, not yet, or you'll get torn to shreds! We need to get you patched up…"

"I suppose you think Sonic stands a better chance?" Knuckles snarled, anticipating the usual stream of reassurances that the hero of Mobius would contain the situation, "Be realistic Tails. I went down after just three hits from that thing, and Sonic's only alive now because he can dodge faster than me. As soon as it lands a few strong punches…"

As if to answer this grim prophecy, Tails was suddenly aware of the hideous symphony of flesh colliding with rock, and a sharp gasp from somewhere opposite informed him that Sonic had been dealt his first hit. Sure enough, when he turned to survey the carnage, both fighters were now still, poised after the first intense round. Sonic was struggling to his feet out of the dust and mortar of his impact, an ugly bruise already forming somewhere on the side of his head. Tails felt his heartbeat skip up by several notches; this was getting dangerous. But he forced his mind back into its calm shell to deal with one problem at a time. He turned to a trembling Porker and tried his best to give his older friend a reassuring look.

"Porker, do you still have a communicator with you?"

A series of brief mumblings followed while Porker wiped the sweat from his brow.

"Porker?"

"Sorry, I needed to… gather myself…. Here…"

He produced a small flip-top computer, about the size of a CD, from one trouser pocket and handed it to Tails, who immediately began tuning it to a familiar, nearby frequency.

"You tend to Knuckles, I'm going to get us some help…."

Not to be outdone by his grinning opponent, Sonic leapt back into combat, this time delivering hurricane of swift punches and kicks. The android couldn't counter the blows, but they didn't seem to be doing much damage either. Sonic felt himself tiring as his fists pounded against the golden shell. It was time for another heavy-hitter. He sprang backwards away from the robot's retaliating strike and poised himself on the cavern wall, gathered for a spring. Using the environment like this could mix up his assault and make him more difficult to anticipate. Not giving his foe tome to react in the dark, Sonic curled into another raging Spin Attack and tore at his opponent, catching him right on his barrel chest with an impact that had had cleft most badniks neatly in two during his career. Amid the whirl of motion that the world had become, Sonic ground his teeth in frustration as he realized that he wasn't breaking through. This enemy was holding strongly! The next sensation was one of tooth-shaking pain as the robot drove his fist sharply into Sonic's jaw from the side, casting him off and sending him sprawling to the dust. Sonic recovered with his usual haste, but his movements were becoming sluggish and disoriented. He massaged his stricken jaw; that last attack had been brutal! It was only the rush of a fight and the determination to win that had kept him conscious! He shook the dregs of weariness from his and glared once more at his rival. The poisonous red sheen in his eyes had grown deeper, more lustful, as somewhere within that sculpted framework of wires and microchips, it tasted blood.

"Huh… you take a Spin Attack pretty well Goldilocks…" he snarled, managing to slot his lower jaw back into an articulable position , "but you can't hold forever. It's only a matter of time before something gives…."

Another eerie wisp of steam signalled that the machine was speaking again, on the verge of a whisper.

"I agree. You, perhaps?"

Sonic spat a clod of saliva and shuddered with motion again. He wasn't going to take this kind of smack-talk from one of Robotnik's old rejects! This time, he wouldn't attack directly. Darting to one side in a shimmering streak of darkness, he swept in with a swift sliding tackle that clipped the robot's thigh, upsetting its balance, sending it stumbling to one knee. Perfect. With another rebound from the walls he had powered into the machine's upper arm, burying a furious Spin Attack like a meteor into its shoulder joints. He felt something snap, a hiss and crackle of disintegrating metal, the shriek of protesting mechanical parts! Yes, at last something was happening! Happening yes. Danger! A spurt of awareness warned Sonic, with micro-seconds to spare, of the arm flashing over his head, aiming for his temple. He ducked the blow and kicked off, just in time to dodge an energetic shoulder barge. As he landed, he felt that rare, horrifying flush of fatigue oozing through his muscles, the burning of tiredness. And he was suddenly terrifyingly aware that the robot seemed unaffected by the jagged wound in its right shoulder. It was leering at him with just as much hideously crafted malice as ever, casually clenching and unclenching one fist, giving the overall impression of a hunter facing a cornered prize.

I can feel you slipping hedgehog…" it hissed, advancing with a surprisingly soft stride. Sonic began to panic, sweat creeping over a brow that was furrowed by outside toughness. His vision was blurring. The fight was becoming harder and harder to keep track of. And this psychotic machine seemed on top form! He made out the flicker of the android's gleaming teeth, lamp-light of his blazing eyes glinting off the metal.

"Aah yes, I knew this would happen sooner or later. Hedgehogs, I take it, aren't famed for their ability to see in the dark. I, on the other hand…"

Sonic couldn't see much. But he did make out the rising of a single iron-clad hand out of the gloom to rap gently against the grinning metal skull. A dim green after-glow had mingled with the throbbing blood-red, a slow hum had become audible from somewhere inside that twisted cranium. Sonic felt his waning strength shake inside him. It could have been thought of as the nail in the coffin, the crowning insult for this monster to throw into the brawl. Night-vision! The robot nodded, the deliberate motion sickening Sonic to the core.

"Oh my, yes…"

One last burst. He had to give at least that much. With a roar that could have sent him spiralling to the sky in one blast of primal rage, Sonic drove past a straight-arm strike that dug a neat crater in the wall and, almost breaking apart under the strain of a lightning-quick about-turn, aimed another deft attack, hoping to shatter the robot's lower body, bring it off its feet, give him a chance to lay into it properly. The darkness and scattered prongs of light melted into a single smear as he dived back on his opponent, the space between them vanishing in a heartbeat, ready for a strike that would hit like a tidal wave….

Bright lights spinning in his field of vision. A screech of the air being rent apart. White-hot pain and the feeling that his lungs had been jettisoned from his ribcage. With acute embarrassment against a growing tide of despair, Sonic realised that he had impaled his chest on the sole of the android's gigantic boot, got caught by a last-minute roundhouse kick that could knock him straight to the grave. He crashed to the floor, the world moving at half-speed, felt the will to fight drain out of him with the last of his blood. But the callous grip of the detritus underneath him could have been heaven compared to the vomit-inducing spectacle of the robot, snarling in victory, somewhere miles overhead.

From where they sat Tails, Knuckles and Porker watched the crushing defeat with rising panic. Tails' jaw had fallen open, the sheer power of this prehistoric creation bowling him over even though he hadn't felt a single punch or kick. It still made no sense; this creature had been left unattended for years, it was composed of backward, out-of-date technology. Logically it shouldn't even have a brain left to guide it! It should have rotted and collapsed with the other assorted spent nightmares lurking in the cave. But the scene spoke for itself. There was Sonic, blood leaking in a choking globule of bile and spit from his mouth, stomach heaving with laboured breathing, eyes bleary with the beckoning hand of death.

"This isn't over…" he heard Knuckles growl, trying to rise shakily back to his feet, readying both fists, "I'm alive and that means he hasn't won…"

"Knuckles, you aren't ready!" Tails reminded him, prompting a spasm of pain as the echidna sank back to one bleeding knee and grimaced , "We need to be careful! It's obvious that we can't trade punches with this creep, or he'll wipe us out!"

"Better than hiding… wouldn't you agree Porker?" he added with a note a biting derision. Porker himself was too terror-struck to respond, cowering against the cavern wall, his nerves gathering like vomit in his throat. Tails gave the quivering pig a reassuring pat on the shoulder, trying to keep his mind set to the task.

"Porker relax, we aren't done here. You're right about that Knuckles. But this doesn't call for an all-fists-blazing approach. We're going to have to play this fight differently."

"I'm all ears…."

Tails brushed an unruly lock of hair from his eyes, focussing on the monstrous scene in front of him. The android had recovered his poise, levelling one open palm in Sonic's direction. Tails had already identified the energy launchers feeding into the machine's fists. The strategy was clear. Then he began to tremble as an idea came to him. A hatefully risky idea, an idea that could backfire horribly. But anything was better than bowing to this demon. It was time for him to make his mark.

The robot gazed serenely down at his victim, levelling one hand over Sonic's face, twisted with hatred and on fire with a will to fight on that his muscles simply wouldn't obey. Sonic's indomitable spirit was now a prisoner in a broken body. And as long as it stayed there, the machine could strike one more name off his creator's hit-list. With a slight alteration of internal energy flow, the robot send glowing rivulets of power, plasma hot enough to dissolve granite, seep into the specially protected chambers of his hands and knuckles. A faint glow began to gather within, sending up a haze that distorted Sonic's mutilated visage. The damage now seemed all the more permanent.

"Yet another oversight on the part of my creator," the machine mused, emerald light seeping through its eyes as it slowed to its killing pace, "Sonic the Hedgehog is only a threat to those who cannot face him head-on. I am disappointed in you, Sonic…"

The mocking whine in the robot's synthesised voice sent hatred like molten lead running in Sonic's blood. He wanted to rise, to rip this titan to shred where it stood, but his body wouldn't take it. He must be content to lie here and wait for death.

"Though I must thank you for one thing. You have indeed been an accurate test of the power I posess. Considering how slight an opposition you were, I think I can safely assume that my eventual conquest of this planet, the advance of the new world order, will be no less strenuous. Cryax…. Yes, Mobious will quake to hear that name before long…"

Cryax… a name at last to pin that loathsome voice upon…. For all the good it would do a fallen hero, Sonic thought. At least Mobius will be able to recognize their next hated despot when they heard him. Cryax himself continued, faint tinkles of hysteria sliding gracefully into his mechanised voice.

"It's all running so smoothly. The Freedom Fighters, legendary warriors that brought about the destruction of Robitnik's empire, demolished with barely an effort by the natural successor to their great nemesis. Such artistry belongs in a book, or a painting! Oh yes,

_Now Cryax wakes, _

_Let Mobius quake._

_The tides will turn,_

_Every city will burn._

_The sea will turn black,_

_We machines, we are back!_"

Cryax finished his maddening symphony with a swift, crackling series of bleeps somewhere from within his skull. Sonic vaguely guessed, with a deepening stab of hatred, that it could be a shrill discord of laughter. A strange trait for a machine, even alongside its apparent skill with poetry. Cryax shook his head, returning to the real world from his mechanical dreams.

"Poetry? A rare skill for a robot, wouldn't you say Sonic? Oh yes, these next few centuries are going to be _wild…._"

Sonic felt the heat, cringed against the rising glare of the energy launchers.

"Just let the world remember who died first, Sonic the Hedgehog."

A final piercing crackle of dull artificial laughter, and Cryax fired. Fire and fury engulfed the spot where Sonic was lying, the dying light filling all of his vision, driving home the terrifying notion we all recognise as the end of the world….


	5. Back From The Brink

**Back From The Brink**

A joyous, celebratory gush of curling steam from among a face positively alight with vicious triumph. It was all Cryax could do to stop another throttling blast of laughter from skittering up his cavernous throat. Sonic vanished promptly beneath a searing fireball of molten plasma, his silhouette flickering out of life against the hellfire that was eating away at centuries of granite buildup. The heat haze could have turned the cave into another dimension, some sinister corner of the Universe where demons danced amid the solar coronas and delighted in the spurts of cosmic gore. Cryax himself managed to tone down the glare in his eyes to avoid them fusing on him, but the spectacle meant little to him. All that mattered was the ease, the sureness, of his victory.

The light from the blast faded in tombstone silence. The curtain of grey steam wafted aside to show a hollow crater, a space about 2 metres across, the place that would have been a certain hedgehog's grave.

Immediately, the giant machine was suspicious. The strength of his attack had been calculated with a primal bloodlust that betrayed his mechanical heritage. It would have strong enough to torch the rock, certainly, and set Sonic's flesh ablaze on his bones. There would have been no blood, any fluid or soft tissue would have simply disintegrated in the heat. But at the very least he would have expected to see the charred scraps of the hedgehog's skeleton, perhaps a few rags of muscle clinging defiantly to the bone…. Cryax abruptly shook his head, toned up his night vision, readied both fists again. His macabre tendencies, for which he could thank his designer at a later date, needed to be put aside. All he knew was, he was staring at an empty crater. And if there was no corpse, then the hedgehog was alive. This fight wasn't finished…

Somewhere in a secluded corner of the cave, crouched under the protective shell of shadows, the would-be victim of Cryax's onslaught was still trying to come to terms with his situation. First of all, it appeared that he was barely alive, after being on the receiving end of just a couple of blows. Secondly, apart from a growing wound on the shoulder joint of his right arm, Cryax himself, he seemed to be in perfect shape. And finally, he appeared to have been rescued from certain oblivion by the one person he had spent years deriding.

"No kidding…. _You _did that?"

Tails gazed down at the prone body of a badly beaten Sonic and shrugged.

"Well, Knuckles wasn't in a fit state and… well, I was pretty much the only one who could move fast enough."

"You're talking about being _fast…._"

Tails couldn't help but loose a glowing smile. His plan had worked perfectly, but only by the thinnest of margins. At the last minute, he had dived in at some astonishing speed, much too fast for Cryax to be prepared for, and snatched Sonic out of the way of the blast! In the glare of the shot Cryax had been unable to clearly see the rescue, and now all of his surviving opponents were not only recuperating and re-gathering their strength, but were, temporarily at least, beyond his sight. They had the darkness, and of course a certain element of faster-than-sound surprise, on their side.

Feeling strength seep back into his arms at last, Sonic struggled onto one elbow and shot Tails a familiar sneer of condescension.

"Not bad, little buddy. Maybe not quite as flash as I'd have liked, but…"

"Yeah, I think he's recovered," came a familiar grunt from somewhere to Sonic's left, "the one thing that never suffers is his ego."

Sonic managed to inch himself around to see a pair of narrowed purple eyes, radiating wild disapproval, and a set of snarling white teeth.

"Good to see you too Red…"

Knuckles sighed and shook his head, setting his dreadlocks in giddy motion.

"Don't call me that. Don't forget, you're the one who had to be rescued."

Sonic cast an eye along Knuckle's emerging face and noted, with a mocking raise of one eyebrow, the numerous wounds now scarring the echidna's muzzle.

"You didn't look as if you were performing spectacularly well yourself."

"I had him where I wanted him…"

"Sure, under his boot last time I checked…."

From out of the gloom there came a sharp staccato series of clicking bones as Knuckles re-clenched his enormous fists.

"Sonic, I'm warning you…"

Tails rolled his eyes and stepped amid the boiling combatants. Why he was acting increasingly as the mediator these days was beyond him, but he suspected that had Sonic and Knuckles not first met swapping punches with one another things might have been running more smoothly some 5 years later.

"Guys, chill. Remember, we still have a bad-guy left to bash."

At last Sonic looked pleased.

"You only had to say so…"

"Wait, Sonic!"

before he could charge back to the battle Sonic found a thick, heavily built arm, dusted with red fur, barring his way. Knuckles cast him a stony amethyst glare from the dark.

"We've already learned that charging in head-on doesn't work…."

"Look who's talking bruise-boy!"

Knuckles managed to swallow the impulse to strangle his friend and continued,

"This is going to call for a less overt approach. Let's not forget, spotting anything in the dark is a chore, even for one of Robotnik's psychopathic death-machines. It's time to give this creep a good and thorough pasting…."

This was getting unsettling. Which was a particular cause for worry for a machine that technically wasn't supposed to get unsettled. Cryax let another footstep drop slowly, taking great care not to disturb the rotting debris and rubble beneath him. For an eight-foot, heavily armed android he could be remarkably stealthy when he wanted to be. And now he was hunting. Instincts of robotic blasphemy screamed through whatever glass and plastic substitute he had for veins, hotter than the plasma in his weapons. He was hunting now, and he was not going to be robbed of his blood again.

"This isn't like you Sonic… cowering and hiding… more like a rat than a cool-as-ice hedgehog, wouldn't you agree?"

When this bait failed to yield an over-confident blur of spikes and fists, Cryax felt a soft shudder run through the cogs and motors of his being. It could have been the machine equivalent of frustration or anger. The urge to rend bone, slit flesh, drag out the screams as blood rose in the throat… another violent head-shake from Cryax. These whispers of lust for violence were snaking around his robotic brain like red-hot wires, choking a mechanical intellect with emotional confusion. He knew what he had to do. Re-establish the empire, resurrect the legacies of Robotnik, suppress all life on Mobius, kill the Freedom Fighters. Kill Sonic. Break him. Slowly. Relish ever howl for mercy, every drop of blood, every…. This time Cryax actually roared. Only softly. A miniscule escape of gas and a briefer-than-brief flare of bloody light in his shining eyes. But it betrayed a moment of collapse. His own mind seemed to be working against him, his muscles, which had seemed so perfectly designed when he was pummelling Knuckles and Sonic, were decaying away from his control. He was under attack from his own body, under attack by an urge to kill, a hatred for the light, that did not belong….

This was as good a time as any to press home an assault at last.

As Cryax grappled with his wanton thoughts, he became aware of a sudden pulse of life, a flicker of activity lighting the heads-up-display through which he saw his world. An attacker. Life. Life that needed to go… no, gain control. Once again, Cryax found himself battling against a mind that seemed to be growing steadily hotter, more alive. Disgustingly, hatefully, _wrongfully _alive.

It was this that left him so unprepared as, with a flurry of double-tails and trailing fur, Tails chose that moment to bury a kick into the side of his skull! Cryax wheeled with a violent roar and tired to catch the fox, but he was gone the next second, hovering just beyond his reach in the gloom, striking with hard and rapid kicks aimed at his face and head. Cryax's mad swipes failed to catch the darting ball of fur.

"Stay still, damn you!"

Tails did not obey. He had the advantage here. But he needed to make more of an impact, not dart about like a shrinking violet, or his stamina would let him down like it had Knuckles and Sonic. He made a lunge forward, arms locking around Cryax's skull. Suddenly, the robot's HUD was black, filled by Tails' body. Then the blows came, hammering against the skull like the blows of a insistent infant. They weren't that damaging, but they came fast. Fast enough to be irritating in the extreme. Cryax bellowed again and made a made swipe with his gigantic arms which Tails dodged nimbly. Then, with a supreme feat of coordination, Tails wheeled from his somersault off Cryax's skull and delivered powerful spinning swipe with each of his double-tails, both of them suddenly becoming harder than iron as they tore across Cryax's face. The impact sent a deep fissure skirting along the android's pristine features. Cryax loosed another roar and punched like a maniac; this was unacceptable. The fox would pay for this outrage. But before the hail of wild blows could find their mark Tails had backed away, retreating to the floor, crouched in low stance and gathered for a dodge.

"**Enough!**"

Finally buckling under the force of his own mounting rage, Cryax lunged forward, one fist hurtling towards Tails like a meteor. Tails whipped away to the left, but Cryax had been expecting evasion. In his fury he swept his elbow in a strike that caught Tails near his right hip, sending him spinning gracelessly to the floor. As he scrambled to right himself, Cryax threw out one palm and loosed a dazzling bolt of fiery plasma at the retreating fox. It buried itself into Tails' back and threw him savagely against the rock, harsh basalt finally wiping his grin from his face in the most brutal way possible. Finally, Cryax allowed himself another laugh and plodded towards his prey, readying another shot. His brain was boiling over now, enough murderous thoughts stewing inside it to let him unleash all of his rage at once.

"You aren't smiling anymore, infidel…"

"Nor you!"

The cry did not come from Tails. But Cryax realized that a moment too late. He buckled and crumpled sideways with a jerk of motion as Knuckles' fist smashed into his right cheek, widening the ugly scar that Tails had opened. Cryax was looking homicidal, his eyes lighting to solar intensity in his rage, as he turned to see a revitalised echidna flexing his muscles before him.

"**Die when I say so, lowlife!**"

Cryax lashed out with another blow, this time hasty and uncoordinated, which Knuckles' side-stepped. The next thing Cryax felt was a punishing melee of punches landing sporadically along his chest and back as Knuckles vaulted over him, fists blazing, and retreated to a safe distance. Tails watched from his spot, apparently forgotten by the rampant android, and gathered himself for his next turn. It was working. The team-based, hit-and-run approach seemed to be chiselling away at the robot's strength. But what seemed to be helping them even more was that, for all his meticulous construction, Cryax seemed to be rapidly losing focus. His movements were becoming sluggish and confused, as if his body were in growing pain, and in his rising anger he was also losing vital concentration and technique. The heroes needed to act on this advantage and down the robot quickly, before it floored any of them again. Cryax lumbered forward with another strike, slamming both fists furiously into the place where Knuckles stood. Had been standing. This time even the bruised echidna had been able to out-manoeuvre his struggling foe. Cryax struggled, snarling evilly, back to a standing position. His voice was becoming even more gruff and strained, his volcanic anger failing to subside.

"Stop it… **don't mock me**!"

Cryax should really have anticipated what came next, but in his wild state he was not thinking clearly. By the time he felt the ball of blue energy hammering into his chest, he was already pinned against the cave wall, nursing a growing dent and hissing with all the venom of an angry serpent. Sonic stared out at him from his newly occupied floor space, flanked on either side by Tails and Knuckles. All three of them had now taken their share of the beatings Cryax had doled out. But all three were also smiling. Their smiles only added to the growing torrent of fury that was building, crumbling and reforming inside the robot's tortured gut. Sonic, on the other had, was once more having the time of his life.

"You're losing your touch, junk-heap. I thought we were getting a run for our money!"

Cryax could almost have been frothing at his iron gums as he hefted his hulking body back into a standing position. Hot steam gushed like a waterfall from his square teeth, now knotting together with hatred.

"You can't win… this ends…. **END!**"

Another charge, this time with Cryax bringing his head whistling down through the air to hammer into the rock as Sonic dodged. This was a bad move; burying his face in the stone left Cryax's wounds widening, his vision blurred, his senses impaired…. And the tempest of his anger rising with every second.

"Not losing your cool are you?"

The response, as Cryax turned a beaten and bludgeoned face to his laughing adversary, was a roar of such wild, horrifying purity that it was almost beyond his mechanical voice-box to conjure it. One of his eyes was cracked, sparks popping from the gash that had been made by the rock. But the one that remained blazed with more intensity than an exploding star. As impossible as it was, as terrifyingly unreal as it seemed, Cryax had lost his mind. One instinct erupted now from under the rotting and re-rotting pile of coded instructions in his head; the urge to kill.

The robot moved so swiftly that even Sonic had trouble dodging. A scissor-kick to the jaw barely fazed Cryax as he stamped with enough force to shatter the floor, the shockwaves sending Sonic spinning backwards to safety. But this time, Cryax was too furious to pursue his target. On the edge of his field of vision, Cryax glimpsed a fresh target, closer, ripe for crushing. With a banshee shriek he lashed out with an elbow-barge that caught Knuckles under the chin, hurled him sideways, re-engaged him at last. Another punch whistled forward, threatening to cleave his skull, but this time Knuckles was ready. He caught the brunt of the force in one cupped hand and drove the other into Cryax's lower stomach. Then, knowing of the hell that would follow, he rolled deftly to one side as Cryax retaliated with a knee that blew another crater out of the cave wall. Tails, by and by, hovered close behind his opponent's head, just beyond sight, ready to make another quick hit. He swooped low, aiming for the base of the neck with another sweep of his tails, but he underestimated the frenzy that now gripped his foe. The last he heard as an iron hand battered against his skull was Cryax's maddened wail, caught in the burning of his own eyes.

"He's on the ropes guys! Keep it up!"

"Didn't need a reminder Sonic…."

With Cryax still reeling under the impact of his own degenerating mind, Knuckles dived in with another arching right-hook that crumpled the plates on the android's left cheek, throwing it shoulder-first to the floor. At last, the rampaging machine was off his feet, vulnerable! Following up this devastating turn of tide, Sonic flashed into life in an almost invisible Spin Attack, a sliver of blue energy in the darkness that sliced cleanly into the robot's prone form, shredding the metal in a shower of orange sparks, then bounced away. His work was done; where there had once been a pristine sheet of metal there was now an almighty gash splitting Cryax's chest from his lower jaw to his hip in a jagged diagonal line. Sparks popped like fireworks at tiny intervals. As if struggling to comprehend his own damage, Cryax gingerly ran a massive hand across his wound, disbelief lighting across his face. Sonic, being Sonic, felt that a quip was in order.

"I think you're going to need a few stitches Cryax!"

In the circumstances, it was possibly the worst thing anybody could have said to an angry, rapidly maddening robotic powerhouse that was toting enough power in its fingers alone to demolish mountains. But Sonic had never been noted for his tact.

Cryax righted himself so quickly that he hardly seemed to move in normal dimensions. The group scattered at random, spreading themselves out, presenting their adversary with as many potential targets as possible. Such sophisticated tactics were lost on Cryax however, who simply swung his fist at the nearest convenient target, in this case Knuckles. The second one-two strike caught Knuckles under the ribs, winding him as he hit the floor. Noticing vaguely among the final scraps of his brain that Sonic was approaching from over his shoulder, Cryax spun like a tornado with a kick that swept the speeding hedgehog out of his way like litter in a gale, his sheer momentum carrying him back around with a plasma-charged haymaker that pummelled a waiting Tails in the chest in a flash of searing golden fire. He wasn't thinking anymore. All he saw was life, intruding on him for every angle, and his mind was overloading with infinite ways to eradicate it. Another wild shoulder-barge failed to catch Knuckles, and the sensation of Tails wrapping a series of kicks around his skull would have been enough to tip the psychotic droid over the edge at last. One roar and a colossal expulsion of energy later and Sonic, who had been moving in for a last-chance surprise attack, was lost against a fireball of yellow plasma that erupted from Cryax's outstretched hand. A furious howl behind him told him that his haphazard kicks had downed Knuckles. Which left only the fox, who a mere heartbeat later was choking in Cryax's triumphant grip, the life being squeezed out of his chest through his ears as the android drew his defeated prey close. His one good eye was blinking rapidly on and off, pulsing lines of dirty neon dashing across it.

In an organic being, it could very easily have been a twitch.

Cryax's insidious steamy breath filled Tails' fogging vision as he kicked and struggled vainly in a grip that could have crushed the stone of the cave itself to a mere powder. As every breath left him, so was his will to continue. He was suffocating, the darkness pressing in on him, leaving only the flickering luminescence of Cryax's surviving eye.

"_The sea will turn black,_

_We machines, we are back….._"

There was a peculiar, high-pitched quality to the robot's voice as it recited its insane ballad again. Were the faintest traces of a mad giggle slithering into that wire-lined throat? Tails could not have cared, but in his animalistic degeneration his opponent could have cared little more. His fingers tightened, hydraulic pistons driving their weight relentlessly into Tails' windpipe. The singular light of that mad eye hovered before him, multiplied and swarmed like some monstrous mechanised aurora. After all his adventures, after all the hope that had bubbled through his body when Cryax had been downed at last, his life was going to end here, underground and festering among the toys of a forgotten lunatic. It was enough on its own to make him wish it were all over….

Had that been a noise? Cryax's senses, now blaring at him in red-alert like a hail of shooting stars, had been picking up the slightest heartbeat, the fall of a drop of sweat, with his anger shooting into uncharted territory. His sensors were blasphemously alive again; more life. Unhindered, unspoilt life, coming his way, from further up the cave. It would have to go. Tails would not trouble him now, as long as he kept his grip true. Pivoting slowly where he stood to gaze up the cavern, Cryax's roving stare lighted on the warm, pulsating body of another target, picking its way cautiously over the rubble and debris that littered the floor. The telescopic lenses in his surviving eye homed in at once, scanning this intruder, assessing every facet of its emerging surface. Details snailed out from the dark towards his vision. A baggy white t-shirt. Combat trousers. Scuff-toed, thick soled trainers that were making the interloper's tread so light. And in one hand…. Cryax's mental activity ground momentarily, fatally, to a halt as it recognised what appeared to be a cousin, a being of metal and plastic…. A weapon, lodged in the crook of one arm.

"Show me…."

It did. In the crack of fire and thunder that lit up the cave, Cryax just had time to catch sight of a pair of glittering emerald eyes and a drooping fringe of hanging locks, coated with pink fur, before a red-hot bolt of iron buried itself mercilessly into the ghastly wound that covered his chest. In seconds a blitz of the arrow-headed projectiles were pounding against him, their onslaught sending him stumbling backwards, the shockwaves slackening every one of his synthesised muscles. It was all the distraction Tails needed as he crawled, stricken and breathless, from Cryax's grip. He looked up sweat-faced and panting at his rescuer, now framed in the light that accompanied each blast from her weapon. Tails smiled to himself. It was only Amy's exemplary marksmanship that had kept him out of the firing line.

"Cutting it a little fine, aren't you?"

The pink hedgehog shouldered her crossbow with a casual swing of her arm and shrugged.

"If you wanted, I could have just let him get on with it."

"Duly noted."

A set of white teeth leapt out from the dark as Amy smiled wryly back at him.

"Now," she sighed, with the business-like air of someone who was indulging in some light housework, "let's get this job done with, shall we?"

Digging crossbow bolts out of the crevices in his deformed body, catching horrible glimpses of the advancing Freedom Fighters with his one remaining eye, Cryax's already fervent mind was on the point of ripping itself apart. Piling itself on top of his impossible defeat, on the disastrous state that his wounded shell was now in, were repeated tidal waves of cold, artificial nausea, the mental spasms that had caused his fighting technique to slide downhill so rapidly now throwing themselves at his psyche with renewed vigour. Every spare glance caused them to up their intensity, shredding through every instinct that told him to carry on with his fight, to think rationally and clearly. He was cocooned within a drowning pool of his own anguish now, sinking like a stone; hideous life, polluting life, all around him, crawling through his bodily wounds, corrupting the perfection of his construction. Sensors throbbed all around his skull like a migraine, begging to be turned off, for the lights to go out, for the heat to cool, for it all to just _go away!_ And as he looked up to see Sonic, Knuckles, Amy and Tails closing in on him, ready to finally bury their killing blows into his tormented body, he knew that he would be unable to stand it. He needed to get away. That was all there was to do now. To run.

"I have endured this game long enough, infidels…" he croaked, pain and stress tangible within his broken voice.

"Save it," Sonic growled, planting one foot triumphantly before him as Cryax squirmed, "we're finishing this."

"You will finish nothing!"

One iron-finished hand, heating and glowing as the plasma gathered at its tip, raised itself under jerking control to face the heroes.

"This will not be the last you hear of me," Cryax intoned, hatred lacing every venomous pulse of his steamy breath, "just be aware, Freedom Fighters, that you have a new name to fear.

_Now Cryax wakes,_

_Let Mobius quake!_"

Before even Sonic could dive on him, Cryax had swept one hand deftly into the gloom behind him and loosed the blast. Age-old stone fragmeneted and parted against a curtain of solar-heat, the glare filled the cave, driving back the darkness with such vigour and violence that all within were, temporarily, blinded. All sight was lost as the demon fires plunged onward, the cries of Cryax plummeting into silence.


	6. Going Underground

_NB: Profuse apologies for the lateness of this update, I hate to keep the fans waiting, but I'm sure you all know how big a thief of time revision and exams are. Anyway, enjoy this insalment. More regular updates promised from now on._

**Going Underground**

Stray bullets of blasted rock hurtled past in a blizzard as the Freedom Fighters braced themselves against Cryax's last ditch-effort. Against a glare so blinding that the surrounding darkness seemed visibly shoved backwards to the cavern corners, Cryax's towering silhouette, now riddled with assorted scars and crumples from his intense battle, became lost to the shrinking organic eyes trying to keep track of him. As the roar of the shredding rock tore past his flattened ears, Sonic crouched steadfastly against the blazing torrent, ignoring the occasional impact of a loose flying pebble against his flesh, and kept his squinted eyes strained for his opponent. The instant this new enemy had dealt him his first beating, when he had heard traces of insane desires and dreams oozing from his throat in the form of that twisted little poem, he had been wary. Outwardly, he was the same aloof, all-conquering hero that Mobius knew. But inside, lodged within his base, heroic instincts, he had sensed something that could pose a new, quite horrific threat to the planet. Which meant that Sonic couldn't rest from now on until his duel with Cryax, started in the bloody dark of an Emerald Hill Zone cave system, was ended for good.

In spite of himself, Sonic allowed a grin to cross his features. Hadn't he been thirsting for such action only hours before now, gathering dust under Tails' hammock? It was almost as if his prayers had been answered. But he needed to keep himself grounded to ensure that this challenge didn't overrun him.

As the light of the blast finally died, winking out of existence in an antithesis of the fury with which it had entered, the heroes strained to see past the hanging curtain of smoke and vapour to catch some glimpse of their quarry. Sonic heard Knuckles, possessed of far better night-vision than him, curse savagely through bleeding lips.

"Damn it, he's gone!"

Amy lowered her crossbow, until that point trained on Cryax's figure somewhere in the blast, from her shoulder. With the smoke lifting at last, the Freedom fighters were able to catch some sight of Cryax's handiwork. The rock wall had caved completely, blown cleanly open by the robot's energy blast. It was now a saw-edged arch, leading into another pitch-dark corridor snaking under the Emerald Hill Zone. From somewhere in the impenetrable darkness, the unmistakeable rhythm of heavy, lead-footed steps, becoming fainter as they retreated into the gloom.

Sonic loosed a triumphant snort of laughter.

"How about that! He's chickening out on us!"

"He isn't getting away…" Knuckles growled, "the whole planet is in deadly danger with that monster still at large. Plus," he added, massaging his bruised and burnt chest, "I owe him a beating."

Amy took this opportunity to take stock at last of her friends. All of them were badly beaten, and Knuckles in particular seemed to have taken a ferocious pounding. She placed a hand on his upper arm, trying to coax him back.

"Knuckles, that doesn't sound like a good idea to me, you're in bad shape…."

"I'm fine, honestly, just let me…."

Knuckles' final protest lapsed into a pained howl as the pain sealed within his numerous wounds suddenly flooded his being, brought him groaning in agony onto one knee. Tails stumbled forward, still only half-conscious from shortness of breath, and caught the echidna around the shoulders.

"Easy Knuckles, none of us are up to chasing that creep now."

"You're right," Amy interjected, taking command as the only fighter who was not currently smeared in her own blood and carrying so many wounds that her body was barely held together, "We'll just have to get our strength back and hunt him down. With Mobius on the alert, we'll be prepared when we run into him again. C'mon Sonic, help me with this…."

Amy realised that she was talking to an empty space. The steady whir of a sudden breeze in the dark told its own story. Her spikes billowed in the slip-stream of Sonic's sudden acceleration. While Tails and Knuckles frowned behind her, Amy loaded another round of bolts into her crossbow and shook her head.

"I should have known," she sighed, "just try telling Sonic not to chase something…"

The surrounding rock was simply another dark smear as Sonic bounced and hared along the tunnels, tracing the dull thunks of Cryax's metallic footsteps. His teeth were set into an unfamiliar grimace, a snarl that betrayed the true desire to fight that was now pouring through his blood. Of course he was going to pursue the robot. Chiefly of course because he represented a very real and definite threat to the wellbeing of Mobius, but also for the reason that he had just been dealt a particularly humiliating pummelling at the hands of his fleeing opponent. And, as was always the case in such situations, Sonic just had to have the last punch in edgeways. Some distance ahead, from out of the stalactite-enclosed darkness, a glint of golden metal flashed against Sonic's narrowed eyes, and he quickened his pace, readying his limbs for a blizzard of strikes. Sure enough, Cryax was looming out of the dusk a second later, struggling to outpace Sonic at his hobbling, damaged stride. Sonic sprang from the floor, vaulting towards his opponent.

"What's the rush train-wreck?"

He was regretting the quip a second later as the flat of Cryax's wild hand connected with his jaw, sending him tumbling backwards in a ball of blue motion. He managed to right himself at the last instant, a quick backflip setting him back into combat stance for another shot. He leered back towards the mechanical scowl of the android, one eye spasming periodically in the half light.

"You and me aren't finished yet."

"I can assure you we are….."

The icy calm of the robot's cracked voice was obliterated seconds later with a scream of fury as he dived on the hedgehog with a clenched fist. Sonic darted nimbly out of the way of the attack and felt himself graze his arm against the rock wall. The space around him was itself now an obstacle, the rock walls threatening to pound him as hard as Cryax's fists. He ignored this discomforting revelation as he made another dive at Cryax, burying a swift one-two punch in his shoulder. The impact sent Cryax rocking sideways, his upper-body spinning clumsily into the wall. Sonic would have grinned at his triumph, but the robot didn't give him a chance. Sonic felt the bone-crushing impact of the robot's knuckles break against his spine like a tidal-wave, hurling him face first to the floor. As Sonic picked himself from his ungracious landing he became painfully aware of a growing heaviness in his bones, a feeling of his muscles hanging limply from each bone like stewed meat, bereft of any of their usual vim or toughness. It was the fatigue, so rare in his stamina-stacked body, crawling through every nerve and slowing it down, cajoling his body into shutdown limb by limb.

As if Sonic would listen when his ears were currently clogged with adrenalin, killer instinct and sheer arrogance.

Another sweeping roundhouse-kick pummelled into the robot's chest, a strike that definitely should not have sent the giant machine sprawling against the cave wall. When, to Sonic's immense surprise and relief, this was precisely what happened, he wasted no time in diving on top of Cryax with a thunderous Spin-Attack that tore the machine's left shoulder plate free in a scream of twisting iron. Cryax loosed another strained mechanical below and lashed out with a free elbow. Sonic felt the blow whip over his head, barely ducking its bone breaking force, and dived for the floor. Perhaps he could keep the momentum behind his rebound onslaught going, keep the giant on his toes? But there was a disadvantage heaped onto his shoulders here. Not just the fatigue gradually squeezing his strength out of his body, but something altogether more pervasive, crushing, all-surrounding….. it was washing against his face right now, in stark mockery of his blindness. Sonic cursed silently as he realised that, true to Cryax's predictions, he couldn't see well at all in the constant gloom. Wrapped in the blackened veil, Sonic heard the mountain of metal crash down on top of him out of the dark before he knew which way to dodge. A mammoth arm, gouged with chips and cuts but still no less punishing, swept underneath him and caught him under his chin, hefting him cleanly off his feet and planting him, with a bloody artificial vengeance, against the jagged rock of the cave wall.

Sonic felt the fragments scar his face, howled as the rock smashed against his back, groaned where he hung as Cryax ruthlessly pressed his hydraulic biceps into his ribcage, teasing the bones to snapping point under his malicious neon stare. Steam gushed from between the brutal jaws, as if the monster was panting from battle exhaustion. Through the deepening red haze of fading consciousness Sonic could see the irregular jerks and pops of electricity and fibre around the robot's head become more agitated, more violent. Whatever equivalent this beast had for sanity was vanishing swiftly into the abyss.

"Squeal, hog, _squeal_…."

The metal tightened its vice-like hold on Sonic's body, warping the flesh that squirmed beneath it. Sonic felt his breath become hot and bitter in his mouth, gritted his teeth against more screams as the bones under his skin got ready to shatter. If he did die down here, perhaps he could hope that as his body burst it would soil the demon's skin in some way. It was all that was left for him to do now.

Then, from out of the crimson-shades that had now settled on Sonic's head, there came a sudden brilliant shaft of light, an arrow of fire that whipped past the gloom and buried itself against Cryax's skull. The impact rattled the monster to the base of his neck, jolted him the miasma of tiredness away from the fight. As the robot's grip slackened, more crossbow bolts hammering home against his torso and upper-body, Sonic kicked away from the wall with the last shred of his agility, his body sinking back into a crouch next to the advancing shadow of Amy Rose, silhouetted in the light of her own fire. The last of the bolts coughed out of her crossbow to assail the villain. Glittering green eyes leered playfully at Sonic through the wisps of gunsmoke as Amy lowered her weapon.

"You can pay me back later Sonic." She giggled. Sonic cringed visibly and brushed a clinging line of sweat off his forehead with the back of one hand.

"Don't count on that one…."

Amy's intervention could have been all that Sonic needed to get back into this fight and win. At least, Sonic relentlessly told himself this one shred of consolation. But he only wished his broken body would believe him. If he launched himself back into battle with Cryax now it would not end well. He was simply too exhausted to fight any longer, even with Cryax in his weakened state. But his pride kept him on his feet and his glare as fresh and as young as ever as he and Amy fixed their sights on the robot before them, now hunkered down under the sheer weight of his own pain. Sonic flexed one fist. Despite the pain his felt whenever he moved his fingers, the blood oozing from the torn fabric where he had cut his hands against Cryax's body, he still wouldn't allow himself to lose. He grimaced at his opponent and noted, with some degree of satisfaction, that he was trembling.

"Give it up, bag-of-bolts. You can't keep this up, even you should have got that into that dustbin you call a head by now."

The mechanised judder and wail of plates grinding together as Cryax raised his head was a chilling enough reply in itself. But now Sonic could see whatever falsified emotional spectrum churning under those malignant eyes rising to the surface, toiling like waves over the android's metallic skin. Underneath a body that was now having increasing trouble holding itself together, Cryax looked ready to burst apart under the sheer pressure of the hatred and malice now storming out from under his shell. Sonic felt a very real fear steal into his bones as a familiar spark of insanity, crocodilian menace laced with the madness of a certain well-known, much hated despot, burn out from Cryax's one remaining eye.

However in the world it was possible for a machine to go mad, Cryax had managed it. And with every passing second that life intruded on his protected world his madness gorged itself on his own anger and confusion. Cryax was ready to either explode or crumble to dust.

"This fight isn't over, infidel! I know what you fear, more than ending this fight here. If I escape, heal my wounds, recover my strength….. this planet of yours has a new gun to its head, doesn't it?"

Sonic hid his tremor of nervousness beneath a wall of disgust. He narrowed his eyes to emerald slits as he readied himself for the final drive.

"You're done…"

"Not yet meatbag!"

The sudden violent flash of Cryax's wrist blasters flaring into life punched through the darkness of the cave, sending Sonic's senses reeling from the sheer ocular impact. Both Cryax's hands were enveloped in quivering globes of orange fire, ready to hurl in Sonic's direction. Sonic heard the gravel scrape beneath him as Cryax's enormous feet dug in, gathered for a blast.

"Bye-bye, infidel!"

Sonic and Amy were both so prepared to dive out of the way of the hurricane of destructive energy at Cryax's behest that it took them totally by surprise when, a heartbeat later, Cryax had flung both his hands over his head, sending a serpentine column of energy burrowing with a bestial howl into the rock ceiling. Curtains of rubble and debris crashed to the floor in a panicked quake as the heroes tried to gather themselves. Through the intensifying curtain of smoke and dust Sonic saw Cryax turn heavily on his heel and bolt into the darkness, hobbling clumsily further down the tunnel.

"Hey! Hold it…"

Sonic would have dived past the cascade of rock to reach his fleeing adversary. He would have hared down that tunnel in a flash of blue fury and finished the job, ripped that sneering mechanoid limb from limb and nip this growing nightmare in the bud. Unfortunately, burrowing through several tons of solid rock in the dark would have been a feat for Sonic on a normal day. Down here, battered and wrecked and bleeding into the dirt even where he stood, his body just wouldn't allow itself to be damaged any further. It shut down in mid-spring, sending Sonic crumpling to one knee, paralysed with pain, while the cave roof whirled and smashed to the ground. With every second Cryax's fierce light and the pounding of his footsteps faded into the all-consuming thunder of the rockfall.

"Shoot…."

Several steps to his left Amy sheltered her face against the sprays of rock with one outstretched arm, her spent crossbow hung in one hand.

"Damn…. I knew it…."

Gritting her teeth against the rising tide of exhaustion, Amy felt herself choke silently on that unfamiliar sensation of defeat.

"Well, that was naughty…"

The humour was wasted on Sonic. It bounced off the bruised wisps of his quills amid a shield of burning humiliation as he glared at the tumbled boulders. He stared as if his own rage would burn through the ton upon ton of ancient rock. Amy stepped forward smartly and planted a hand on Sonic's shoulder, jolting him to his senses. She allowed herself a brief shot of gratification; it was rare enough for her to be the one taking command of Sonic.

"C'mon, we've lost him Sonic. We'll just have to…"

"I'm not done! Not… done…."

If Sonic had been intending to make a dramatic, last-chance charge through the barrier, it certainly didn't go as planned. Against the overwhelming hammer-blow of his own exhaustion, his muscles simply rubberized, flinging him head-first into the debris as he tripped over his own blasted feet. Rolling her eyes to the faceless heavens, Amy reached forward and hauled Sonic's battered form back to its feet.

"I think you'll find you are. Now let's go. If Cryax is gone then we need to put the alert around. We'll be ready for him next time."

"Next time…." Sonic was parroting the phrase with every tentative, baby step back up the tunnel, one hand draped over Amy's shoulder for support. Beneath the thick dribbles of tired foam now rolling down his chin his teeth were gnashing feebly as Knuckles and Tails, both looking all the more rested for their lack of involvement, hared into sight from the rising path to the light.

"We heard the racket," Tails explained, bringing himself to a lurching stop after a burst of his double-tails, "are you two…." His eyes focussed quickly on the beaten wreckage that was now Sonic's body and widened to the cartoon diameter of saucers, "Oh…. Looks rough…."

"I had him…" Sonic gabbled, practically vomiting the words with each laboured breath, "….. just needed a…. right where I…."

"I'm afraid he could be like this for a while," Amy interjected, "We're all going to need to rest up for a while. I'm afraid we lost Cryax, but at least now we know what we're up against. I guess we've got another search on our hands!"

"Porker should be thrilled," Knuckles drawled, "Providing he stays indoors during the fisticuffs."

"How is he anyway?"

"I saw him out the way we came in. Said he had some research to do that might help bring Cryax down."

Knuckles couldn't resist the grins surging to grip his face as Sonic passed him at a limp.

"And by the look of you we're going to need all the help we can get, eh Sonic?"

The hedgehog's growl of futile aggression inflated Knuckles' obscene smile tenfold.

"I had the…. The…"

"Right where you wanted him? Now where have I heard that before….."

"Knuckles, leave it," said Tails, "we all had a hard enough time laying into that thing as it is."

Knuckles obeyed grudgingly, but he could see that the fox's heart was not in his defence. As he turned to face his friend he could also see the fits of giggles surging, barely under control, beneath Tails' face. He and Knuckles exchanged a brief moment, hitting their fists together in an expression of boyish enthusiasm. It was very clear that seeing Sonic in this state was too good an opportunity to pass by, regardless of whether or not you happened to be his closest friend.

By now the heroes were climbing the ascending cavern back to the light and air of the surface world, away from the rust and blood that had been unleashed below. Amy led the way, leading a hobbling Sonic with as much dignity as could be mustered for the occasion, and fumbled at her belt for her communicator.

"I'll get on the buzzer to Porker," she explained, "let him know how we're doing. Might be worth telling him to get the med-kits ready for you guys…."

"How many times did you say you had to hit him Sonic?" Knuckles guffawed, unable to resist the impulse to stay silent any longer. Sonic could only close his eyes and try to detach himself from the world that seemed to be ganging up on him at last.

"No seriously, how many times?"

"Shut up…"


	7. Self Destruction

**Self-Destruction**

"Nano-technology?"

The syllables were vaguely familiar to Tails, darting around a head alive with half-formed scientific wonders, ghosts of tomorrow proclaimed by various bearded authorities to herald the dawn of a new age. Sonic, on the other hand, had no time for such complications.

"What the hell's that?"

Tails allowed himself a sigh. Nano-tech and all the labyrinthine sciences it implied were clearly lost in their complex beauty on Sonic. Porker re-iterated.

"Nano-technology Sonic, think of it! Last I heard it was only an experimental field, billions of dollars worth of research going into just a few select laboratories sampling this stuff, and now Robotnik was cultivating it? This is decades, centuries ahead of current tech…."

Growing impatient, Sonic let one foot fall heavily against the metal floor, the clang resonating with all the premonitions of a painful kick in the thigh.

"Whatever Porker, but you still haven't told me what it is you're gibbering about. What is nano-technology, and how does it relate to what we were dealing with down there?"

Porker drew a single, large breath, steeling himself for a lengthy lecture. On such occasions Sonic was needed more as a restraining influence than anything else, but even as he divulged he was hard pressed to keep the school-boy enthusiasm out of his voice, which broke into an excited squeal on more than one occasion.

"In layman's terms, nano-technology is basically machinery that's operated on a microscopic level, complex circuitry and interior mechanics shrunk down, sometimes to sub-atomic sizes. Like I said, it's a pretty new field, and any nano-tech R&D conducted in the current political and financial climate is extremely costly and only on a small scale at this stage. But the benefits of having refined machinery of that size…."

Sonic couldn't help but roll his eyes as Porker's own glazed over with mystified speculation.

"Machines of that size could be inserted straight into the blood by doctors, it could supercharge a person's immune system or their ability to heal! Think of it; an army of tiny machines cleaning up any infection in your body, ensuring you never get ill again! Or they could augment the growth of muscle tissue, make a person stronger, faster…. Who knows, if they reached the brain they could even…."

"Sounds dangerous to me." Sonic cut in, with typical cynicism in the face of such technological witchcraft, "I can think of a fair few psychopaths out there who'd like nothing better than skin that repairs itself no matter how many bullets it takes."

Porker shuddered, coming at last to the dreaded hole in his argument.

"I admit, in the wrong hands nano-tech could cultivate a fighter few could match. The technology also has some value as a chemical weapon of sorts."

Makes sense, Sonic thought, imagining the cloud of metallic spores, programmed to the edges with the instinct to kill, descending on the pores of a helpless populace, destroying them from the inside…. It was just the kind of process Robotnik would so dearly like to adapt his badnik processing technology into; then he wouldn't need to build plants any more, just rain the builders onto the victims and watch the tiny terrors get to work.

"But still, that's why the technology is so heavily controlled and sanctioned at the moment! The powers that be want to keep it out of irresponsible hands…."

"Hmmm," Sonic grunted, idly checking his knuckles, "I'd better watch my back, or the pencil pushers could put me out of a job."

"So, where does this tie in with Cryax?" Tails pried, attempting to bring Porker back to the point.

"Aaah….."

Porker sheepishly rolled the point of one foot on the floor in front of him and turned to the computer terminal before him.

"I'm afraid that's about as ready an example I can think of where this technology could be deadly in the wrong hands…"

"Robotnik." Sonic finished. Porker looked uncharacteristically solemn.

"I'm afraid so. He was researching heavily into this stuff in the months before his committal, it seems it ran concurrent with his endeavours with the Chaos Monster."

"So there's a link?" Tails asked, suddenly alert. Chaos was still a name that conjured bad memories for all the Freedom Fighters. Across from him he saw Sonic close his eyes sharply, as images of a friend's broken body, coated in residue from the monster's cold fist, shivered briefly in the gutter and lay still.

"Only a slight one. According to some of the logs I uncovered while going through the base Robotnik relied on nano-tech to power a project called the 'Chaos Nullifier', a device meant to implant a microscopic anti-body program of sorts in Chaos' body as a means of bringing him under control. Unfortunately for him, the Nullifier was a failure. Nano-robots just dissolved on contact with Chaos' body. But it looks like our old pal Grimer Wormtongue managed to find another use for the technology."

"Cryax?"

By now Porker's fingers were a blur over the keyboard in front of him as statistics and data flashed snake-like across the screen. Amid the blur of winding text Sonic made out vivid glimpses of assorted mechanical nightmares, spider-like creatures smaller than a pinhead, that bore with them the mark of a malice so great it had once brought a planet to the brink of destruction.

"Bingo. Cryax's internal structure is supplemented heavily with nano-technology, most of his insides are covered in nano-bots. For what I can gather Robotnik was aiming to pioneer a form of machine that mimicked organic tissue, but enhanced far beyond the abilities of any ordinary flesh. The nano-bots in Cryax's body are meant to augment his speed and power, like millions of tiny motors providing him with energy, and they can also heal great damage over time in much the same way as organic skin can."

Behind a veil of disinterest Sonic cursed viciously. All the horrific wounds that he had dealt to the android in the course of their titanic battle, the slashes, dents, the rip in his right shoulder where a protective pad had been sheared cleanly off, even the right eye he had obliterated after head-butting the cave floor…. They would all repair themselves given enough time, and then Cryax would be on top form again.

But then again, Sonic reminded himself as he examined his newly medicated and bandaged limbs, so would he.

"So Cryax can heal himself?" Tails repeated.

"Slowly, but still at a much greater speed than we could heal naturally. Based on the reports Amy sent me of the thrashing you guys gave him, I would give him about a fortnight before he's back in peak condition."

"Two weeks?" Tails looked as if his eyes were going to explode from their orbits.

"It's fast, I know," Porker admitted, shaking his head, "but that doesn't mean he's indestructible. The nano-bots operate from some kind of nerve centre in his body where all the available information is collected. Damage that and the rest of his bodily systems would just shut down automatically."

"Just a wild guess," Sonic drawled, "but isn't that usually the head?"

More incomprehensible patterns flashed across the screen, wire-frames of Cryax's square-jawed visage scrawling into place.

"I think you're right Sonic, most of the calculative activity in Cryax's body takes place in the head, but I'm picking up… other signals…. it's strange…"

"How strange?" Sonic queried, the merest hint of concern edging into his voice as discreet, winking lights began to materialise across Cryax's limbs.

"There are other pockets of intelligent nano-cells lining the hydraulic workings in his arms and legs…. It's like having extra brains in your limbs, working to adapt and vary your fighting style. Which would explain why he was able to give you guys such a thorough pounding. His limbs are practically fighting for him!"

"I could have taken him…" Sonic mused, admiring the scars now lining his torn gloves. Porker ignored him, sparing only a cursory nod and a roll of his eyes, before returning to his computer. Tails had joined him by now, leaning intently into the data sweeping over the screen.

"That doesn't sound right to me," Tails observed, his eyes hovering over the small, shifting pockets of nano-cells embedded in Cryax's artificial muscles, "I'm guessing biology wasn't Robotnik's strong point."

"What're you getting at?" Porker asked, "It sounds like perfect design to me. Cryax's limbs have their own degree of independent thought, it allows them a limited degree of control over their own areas on his body. His limbs can actually record data on the fighting styles of his opponents and adapt to it, his body almost does all the physical work for him automatically!"

"That's what I mean," Tails continued, "I can think of several very good reasons why organic beings don't have spare brains all over their bodies. In order for Cryax to function properly all of those nano-cells would need to be in perfect sync with each other, and if they're all adapting individually to their own needs…."

By now the realisation of Tails' suggestion was beginning to dawn on Porker, who was looking increasingly anxious as the data of Cryax's nano-cells spooled out onto the emerald glass in front of him.

"Yes… yes, I think I understand. Organic creatures like us only need one brain to coordinate our actions, but Cryax has got spare ones developing virtually all the way through his bodily systems. In nature that kind of process would be disastrous; potentially all of the brains could start working against one another, the body wouldn't be able to take it…."

"….eventually it would just shut down totally," Tails finished, coming to his point with, Sonic couldn't help but notice, a distinct flourish, "By my reckoning Cryax will be totally immobile in just a few days! All of the nano-cells will be trying to reject each other, it could totally paralyse him while his body just tears itself apart!"

Sonic couldn't help but grin, letting out a groan of mock-disappointment.

"Awwwww, I was looking forward to beating that creep senseless once I got back to fighting him! So he'll just run out of steam as the cells develop?"

"It certainly seems likely," Porker invented, "but I have a hunch that it could be more dangerous than that…. After seeing Cryax in that cave…"

Sonic raised an eyebrow and waited for Porker to continue.

"Cryax was definitely changing towards the end of that fight, when you guys were starting to get the upper hand. Before he'd been totally in control, but his technique seemed to get sloppier the more the fight dragged on. That's an unusual trait in itself… machines aren't meant to suffer from fatigue or tiredness…."

"He seemed a little distracted if you ask me," Tails observed, "the way he kept getting angrier and angrier…. And all those times where it looked like… like he was in pain..."

Memories crept back of Cryax shuddering and dry-retching under an apparent avalanche of phantom spasms, wracking his flawless body from top to tip, apparently doing frantic battle with his own mind… with his body.

"You think perhaps the nano-cells were already starting to reject each other?"

"Probably. It looked like his mind was ripping itself apart. All those instructions, all those programs and organic instincts, conflicting with each other…."

"Even in a computer," Sonic finished, "that would be enough to drive it mad."

Stony silence followed this last remark. From the experience of virtually all the Freedom Fighters, insanity would be the catalyst that sent normality and safety for the people of Mobius plunging over the brink at long last. Peace simply couldn't hold while some madmen, from Robotnik to the Metallix Brotherhood, from Brutus to the Drakons, had the planet as their playground and a thirst to wreak havoc. Sonic was the first to break the tension, raising a face that had grown slowly more serious and stoic over the course of the last few minutes. Both fists were now clenched, the muscles of his arms relaxed as if for a flurry of strikes. This was a posture that made itself ready to go to war again.

"Great. So now we've got one of Robotnik's clunkers stomping around Mobius somewhere rapidly going out of its mind and wanting nothing more than to rebuild from where Walrus-Guts left off."

The proclamation washed over Tails and Porker like an arctic ocean, setting the knowledge of this new power deep into their heads, forming it for a new challenge.

"Sounds like an incentive for us to get our butts in gear. Porker, think you can track this thing from the data we have?"

Porker turned back to the computer terminal, grateful to at last have a task to immerse himself in.

"I can run a trace program through the badnik patrol network, I found the codes back in that cave there. It's going to be tricky though, Cryax's nano-technology is a constantly changing structure, so it'll be difficult for me to pinpoint his signal."

"I guess that means we'd better start getting hands-on," Sonic declared, turning to Tails as he made for the door, "so you'd better get the word out to the Mobian authorities that this guy is loose. Get in touch with the Metropolitan Guard, put them on alert, okay buddy?"

"On it, Sonic."

Tails exchanged a brief smile with his friend, a sign that he was rallying to the fresh cause, before easing himself into the air with a sweep of his double-Tails and jetting out of the nearest open window. Sonic himself pivoted on one heel and, taking a last glance at Porker frantically running his fingers over the keyboard behind him, disappeared behind the metal shutters.

Not more than a couple of paces down the corridor that would lead him back out into the open, the sound of a rapid, repeated sequences of grunts and pants reached Sonic's ears, stabbing at the otherwise silent air around the tower. As Sonic dulled the sound of his own tread to try and pin down the noise, he also became aware of methodical, steadily planted footsteps and, closer still to the brink of silence, the sound of the air being rent apart under the weight of blows. And this faded chorus of what sounded like sparring was coming from the other side of the storeroom doors at the other end of the passage. A smile crept over Sonic's muzzle as images of a certain angry echidna, desperately trading punches and kicks with thin air in some vain attempt at exercise, stole across his mind. And sure enough, as he leant easily against the door control panel and watched the metal sheets slide aside, Knuckles was there, fists blazing at empty space, his features already beginning to crawl with rivulets of sweat and the muscles beneath his skin heaving and flexing like the breakers on an angry shore. He turned a nonplussed scowl to Sonic as he took a few casual steps into the room and sniggered.

"Working hard, red? Can't say I blame you after the thrashing you took back there, you looked like you were getting pretty flabby lately anyway…"

"I could say the same thing about you," Knuckles coughed humourlessly, but still managing to effect a sly flash of his prominent teeth, "you had to be carried out of that cave after Cryax had his way with you."

Sonic shrugged, putting on the show of a few quick muscles stretches.

"Nothing a few laps of South Island couldn't fix. So what, you're hoping to square some honest punches with that bag of bolts when you meet him next, is that what this is about? Honestly," Sonic chuckled, shaking his head in mock disappointment, "I don't know why you bother. We already know how to beat that creep, just mob him and make sure he doesn't have a way out next time we…"

"That's just it," Knuckles cut in, suddenly becoming serious, "it took all three of us giving it everything we had just to give Cryax a few nasty scars. We practically killed ourselves just getting that far."

Knuckles turned his back to Sonic at this point, settling back into a combat stance as he faced the emotionless air, but kept talking through gritted teeth.

"What if next time one of us runs into Cryax we won't have any backup with us? Supposing it's just one-on-one, straight fist fight. Can't rely on being able to mob him there Sonic."

A blizzard of straight-arm punches hacked at the space just before Knuckle's face, his eyes narrowed to razors of concentration. He followed up with a series of blazing piston kicks, still talking as the blows hammered against non-existent flesh.

"It's obvious by now Sonic, even though I hate to admit it, that Cryax is physically superior to all of us. Individually we're just no match for him. At least not at the moment. We've all got to work hard from here on, push ourselves, make ourselves ready for the next time we step into the ring with that monster. I figured I'd get some training in while I could, get a competitive edge, make sure I can at least fight on equal terms with him the next time I have to face him…."

In an explosion of sudden energy, Knuckles took a dive at the opposite wall, one leg snapping outwards into a scissor-kick that would have decapitated any waiting target. The kick struck the wall of the storeroom with a clang like the first peal of a thunderstorm, sending Knuckles rebounding back through the air. He was totally in control as he plunged back to the floor, fist crashing like an anvil into the helpless steel, and then followed up with a series of backflips that sent him cartwheeling clean across the space, skipping between imaginary bullets, putting some distance between himself and his invisible opponent. Then at last, with a roar that seemed to split the very atoms of the air around him, he righted himself and blazed forward with an almighty shoulder-first charge that, Sonic speculated, could have thrown a juggernaut clean from a highway in a single devastating smash. He finished his barrage of lethality with a sharp uppercut, leaning the last of his weight and energy into a blow that could be seen, in the fighter's hatred of his purple eyes, to cleave Cryax's phantom jaw from his face. He turned back to Sonic, his chest shuddering with burning breaths, his biceps flexing and relaxing in repeated motion.

"…. I'm training, and I'd advise you to do the same."

If Sonic had been paying any attention to Knuckles' activity, he didn't show it. He shot one last despairing grin at Knuckles from under the shadows of his closed eyes, then turned where he stood and began strolling out of the room. He finished the conversation as he made a beeline for the door, signalling with one gloved hand over his shoulder.

"Do what you want with your free time Knux, for all the good it'll do ya. Meanwhile the coolest hedgehog on the planet has some running to do. Catch you later!"

As the doors eased themselves shut, Knuckles allowed himself a growl of displeasure. But Sonic's sheer arrogance was water off his back by now, melting against the volcanic heat and perspiration burning off his skin. He launched a final volley, a blasting punch that ripped a sheet of carbon steel clean from the wall in front of him, drowning the clunk of the closing doors.

As Sonic traipsed casually down the breezy corridors, following the familiar scent of the wind into the open air, he felt himself laugh through his bones at Knuckles' uptightness, the familiar stoic discipline he had known when he had first encountered that manic echidna years before, dogging Robotnik's heels on the Floating Island. It was small wonder they gelled so badly; Sonic was as free as an ocean wind, and Knuckles had lived the countless years of his life shackled to the Chaos Emeralds, doomed to oversee the decaying legacy of those that had left the Floating Island behind aeons ago. If he couldn't free himself from the bonds of Guardianship, the nearest he could manage was to try and drag Sonic back from the wild abandon of total freedom, into some vestige of the duty he so resented. Sonic laughed aloud as he strode into the open grasslands of the Emerald Hill Zone, now tinged with the ribboning light of sunset, flecked off the ocean that ringed the edge of the world. It was just like Knuckles to suddenly adopt this military routine, this urge to torture his body and push his power to snapping point, just because he felt rallied to the cause of the Freedom Fighters. He would probably train endlessly now, slowly dying in that storeroom while he traded punches and kicks with ghosts.

But what ate at Sonic's usual fearlessness as he gathered speed into the burning horizon was that, in the arrow-sharp sliver of common sense embedded at the back of his brain, he knew that Knuckles was right.

Several miles underground, a machine is losing the final battles for its mind.

Hunched like a wizened tree, skin alive with roasting scars and cracks, bleeding neon and power into the cold rock beneath it, a lone android is sobbing into the uncaring earth around it, attacked on all sides by an invisible onslaught of life. Sobbing is the closest thing that comes to describing the vile, vomiting outburst of electronic gurgles and gasps currently streaming from the maddened set of jaws, pouring into the outside world in a torrent of renewed hate. Cryax buried both massive hands against the dome of his skull, which itself now seemed to be tearing itself open a hundred times a second. Another horrid mechanical shriek escaped his grinding voicebox. The awful, horrifying realisation of life that had paralysed his mind earlier when battling with the heroes seemed to have leaked into the rest of his body. His arms and legs were wrenching themselves free of the body that held them prisoner, protocols and instructions collided like tidal waves against newly forming intellects, ideas, blasphemous presences in a mind designed from the circuit boards up to lord wires and metal over invading flesh. Cryax's mind was coming to life, dying and being resurrected over and over again, prising his head apart in a wretched, perpetual cycle….. life blossoming and dying hundreds of times over in a mind that was built to reject life itself.

Insanity could only come to a mechanical being like this. When nature tried to insert itself into the workings. A spanner tossed into a carefully oiled, fragile creation.

Reeling under the sheer weight of his own mental onslaught, Cryax staggered back into the enveloping darkness, neon flaring like burst blood vessels in his eyes, and roared at the blackness. The life was coming at him again, confusing him, ordering its acceptance and rejection at the same time. The whines and moans coming from the android's larynx were becoming ever more pained and pitiful, weak like the failing resistance, weak like his slackening grip on his own bodily control. As his inner workings battled savagely against each other, he put one giant hand out to steady himself on an outcrop of convenient granite. His chest heaved with the effort of keeping upright. Like breaths. The notion stole into Cryax's mind with another knife-like stab of pain, pain that didn't belong. Didn't belong like the breath now coursing through his dead chest. He felt the minerals in the rock, the insects swarming in the soil all around him, pulse through the touch receptors at his fingertips.

He had been made to build an empire, to dominate organic life. Life that he was now starting to feel.

The phantom agony tore at the robot's body in another violent spasm. Barely a second later the rock in Cryax's grip was powder, crushed by the clenching of his fists. He buried his balled hands at his rebelling head once again, sinking to his knees as the wounds of his battle wormed over his body, nano-cells crawling through the metallic tissue to repair the damage. Machines behaving like living beings. Cryax was caught in the limbo now, the mid-point between life and death, flesh and metal. And both were flaring like supernovas in his psyche, shredding everything around them, cutting his mind and body in two, plunging the stricken, screaming robot into the void….

In an instant, the heat of madness and pain cooled. The world snapped back into clear, sharp focus. The screaming darkness hushed at last, returning to the graveyard thrum of the life around it. Cryax himself got steadily to his feet, setting them with deliberate motion, flexing each hydraulic muscle repeatedly, firmly, like a father restraining a nervous child.

His mind had been torn to shreds, he was well aware of that by now. It had simply torn itself asunder under the weight of its indecision, its mad blundering between life, death and conflicting programs. Cryax's mind, that intricate, evolving thing that Robotnik had spent years crafting to adapt into the perfect instrument of death and conquest, was beyond salvaging.

Then again, madness presented fewer problems for Cryax. On the contrary, his purpose was now clearer to him than it had ever been before. Freed from the bonds of his protocols, the chains of reasoning that held that struggling brain together now totally obliterated, everything suddenly made sense. Cryax allowed a smile to work itself over the square of his jaw. The motion was smooth, controlled, and betrayed more insanity than fits of giggling and gibbering ever could. Fresh steam gurgled from the pits of his chest, flowed from between the metal teeth, curled lovingly around the wounds in his body that were now in the process of repairing themselves. Cryax touched one hand to his most recent trophy, the jagged rip in one shoulderm plate courtesy of Sonic.

Sonic. The Freedom Fighters. Anybody who stood for the hideous, polluting process that was sex, death, feeding and breathing that was being alive. Cryax knew now what would set his burning mind to rest at last. The hand over his wound clenched, and dropped to his side.

Life. It would have to go.

All of it.

_The End….. for now. Stay tuned for more episodes from Neon Hades and the Fleetway Universe as the battle against Cryax lurches into life…._


End file.
